[ WP ] A kid doodling in a math class accidentally creates the world 's first functional magic circle in centuries .

The clock reads ten till two, and David is bored. He looks at the front of the room where the teacher is marking up the board with numbers David does n't understand. In the center is a circle and all kinds of symbols David has seen a hundred times yet he still does n't understand. He looks back at his sheet of paper, almost untouched. This class will last until three, that's an hour and ten minutes of staring at a blank piece of paper and ignoring the drone from the front of the class. 
 
 He checks the clock, but it's still ten till two. 
 
 Faced with the options, insanity from boredom and doing actual work, he has a difficult decision to make. 
 
 He picks up the pencil and starts doodling. 
 
 The simple fact is that David, while not a moron, is exceptionally poor at math. The numbers mix together in the air between the teacher and him, and enter one side of his head just to leave through the other. Math just does n't make sense to him, and the symbols on the board are as close to gibberish as it gets, so David starts with the only thing he recognizes: a circle. 
 
 Now, David's no fool. He knows how to make a circle- geometry has always been more art than math to him- and he takes time to get out a compass and carefully make a perfect little circle. If he were paying attention he might know that the circle he created was something special but, again, David is not a smart child and he sees the circle as just that: nothing of importance, just a doodle on a page. Even when he cuts himself finishing the circle, the compass roughly tearing the tip of finger spraying miniture droplets of blood across the paper, he sees nothing special about the day. He does n't hear the singing, softly drifting in on winds unheeded. He does n't see the circle of graphite shrink and shape, settling into the paper and the very desk beneath it. 
 
 And he starts drawing symbols, he does n't notice that they're very different from the ones on the board. 
 
 David copies everything he can see down as well as he can, as if some universal understanding of the objects of mathematical power would be transferred to him by the writing of it. The symbol for Pi became squiggles, Xs and 7s and 8s and even 2s were mistranslated onto the paper, all along the circle. And as the teacher droned on about how to find the area of a circle, David's circle began to glow. 
 
 The singing was loud enough for David to hear it now, a soft melody drifting in on the wind from the air conditioner. To David it seemed they were singing his name- a sweet tone of'Daaaavvvviiiiid' ad infinitum. 
 
 The song grows even louder and David is scared now; scared that the people around him do n't hear anything, scared that the circle is glowing, scared that the runes are beginning to swirl around the circle like they're being flushed down the drain. 
 
 And at this moment something clicks in David's head. A forceful intuition works its way into the cogs and gears of his mind, like the instinct that drives all the salmon in the world to the same lake, and acting on such instinct he opens his hand and slams his palm into the center of the circle. 
 
 The paper glowed brighter than the sun- no, the sun and everything else *dimmed* as the light from the paper grew- and the room around David slowed. The *world* around David slowed. 
 
 And from the paper came a power, an almost solid energy that flowed into David's arm, glowing under his skin like radioactive blood. He pointed to the board in the front, covered with the teacher's sloppy handwriting, and clicked his fingers like he would when pretending to fire a gun. 
 
 The energy poured forth from his arm and leaked across the room, a stream of smokey light. It covered the board, all across the slick white surface it spread, until it had covered the entirety of it. 
 
 And then David blinked, and time around him unlocked, the world started spinning yet again, the sun returned to its glory, and the birds again started singing outside. 
 
 But the beautiful voices that had called his name were no longer singing. And the paper was a burnt up frame missing the original circle. 
 
 The only evidence that it had been real- besides the *feeling* of the energy entering him- was drawn across the board: The teacher, bald head and all, was illustrated in great detail. The... terrible situation, for lack of a better word, he found himself in was in perhaps even *greater* detail. 
 
 And no one had a clue what had happened. The teacher fumbled to erase the drawing, and was quick to throw accusations across the room at the usual troublemakers. David just chuckled and looked at the clock before laying his head on the desk. 
 
 2:05, just forty-five minutes left. 
 
 In his sleep, David dreams of the voices. And when he wakes up their tone rings quietly in the back of his head.
