"Eyes on your own paper."
Mrs. Halloway tapped Bobby on the shoulder with a pencil and gave him a stern look. Bobby cringed and turned back to the inscrutable numbers all over the page in front of him.
Bobby was failing. He could feel it in his bones, knew it more certainly than he knew his own name. Not a single answer on the page so far was even near correct, and the questions he had not yet answered might as well have been written in ancient Sumerian.
If Bobby failed another math test, his parents were going to kill him. Not actually, but by removing his phone and tablet privileges Bobby would be severed from the social framework with the same completeness as a hanging.
Desperately, Bobby muttered a prayer to himself. His family was not religious, so the prayer was a broad one, a psychic yell for help to whatever force might be listening.
Unknowably to little Bobby, sitting at his desk in the fourth grade, something was listening. In a place separate from other places, in a dimension beyond the boundaries of our world, a creature unimaginable heard the call. Bobby's tiny pluck of the strings of the universe bridged the interdimensional rift and alighted on the ears of Gorgath, primordial, if forgotten, Lord of Doom.
In ages past, beyond the recollection of men, when the Earth belonged to other races more receptive to the energy of existence, more nuanced in their relation to life itself, Gorgath had ruled supreme. From his tower on Graz Balind, Gorgath spat orders onto the Earth and bore witness to his own destructive will as agents of darkness carried them out.
But a great uprising was waged against the Godhead, and each and all of the denizens of the Old Earth rose up in unified arms. Using the power of the Zanthor crystals, Gorgath's tower was broken, and Gorgath himself torn from the rubble and sealed within the interdimensional divide.
But this victory came at such a cost that all life on Earth was destroyed. Only hundreds of millions of years later would humanity roam the Earth.
Back at his desk Bobby eyed one particularly laborious math problem.
(3 × 98) ÷ 4 =
In the middle of wondering what the parenthesis meant, the class room disappeared, and Bobby looked up to find himself alone in a room with walls of liquid blood. Before him the full, horrible might of Gorgath loomed.
The voice of Gorgath would destroy the mind of any human who heard it, and so Gorgath used Bobby's own rudimentary brain to transmit his thoughts directly.
HUMAN. BEHOLD GORGATH, LORD OF DOOM.
Bobby was sort of unimpressed by the graphics, although he couldn't remember activating the VR contacts.
"Hey."
Gorgath continued.
I HAVE HEARD YOUR CALL CHILD. YOU WISH TO BE FREE OF THIS, TEST?
This perked Bobby right up. "Oh hell yes. I hate math."
Gorgath laughed, a laugh that in ancient times would shake mountains.
SWEAR YOUR LASTING FEALTY TO GORGATH AND THE DEED SHALL BE DONE.
Bobby wondered at the word 'fealty', but was happy to take whatever help he could get. "Sure."
Gorgath released an orgasmic sounding moan as he received his first believer in millenia.
IT IS DONE.
Bobby blinked and he was back in his seat at school, the test in front of him. He looked around to see what had changed. Disappointed, he saw nothing different.
Mrs. Halloway approached and tapped him on the shoulder again. "Bobby, how many times do I have to tell you, eyes on yo...BRRAAASSHHHHHH"
Mrs. Halloway's head exploded with a hiss, turning what had been her face into a fine mist. As the other kids turned to look at her all of their heads exploded as well. In the hallways of the school and in every classroom, the heads of everyone who was not Bobby exploded into vapor. Elsewhere, in every home and on every street and sidewalk in the district, every single person's head for 5 miles in every direction also exploded.
Bobby sat at his desk for a long time, looking around at the blood stained room. His test paper was a soaking rag of blood. Bobby got up and grabbed his bag, throwing the ruined test into the air as he left.
"Awesome."
Photo Credit
[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commonss