Zeke sat quietly in the Queen of Hearts Bar, an espresso in one hand, a book in the other.  He was reviewing his Linear Algebra, a subject he'd learned years ago.  It was useful, but unbelievably tedious, which was why he'd been avoiding using it for so long.

Now that he was once again staring at pages and pages of matrices and cluttered vector graphs, he wanted any excuse to do anything else.  After forcing himself through another chapter, Zeke ordered a second coffee and a biscotti and pulled out his stack of empty cards.  He was dimly aware of the commotion around him, but within his bubble of blissful sound-cancellation, it was all muted somewhat.  He worked on replacing the magic circle he'd used to cast it, a bit annoyed that in order to enjoy himself he had to use one every time he came here.  It only took fifteen minutes to draw, but still.

At least it was on the easier side of the spectrum when it came to magic circles.  In order to cancel sound, he had to first set a boundary, and in this case he made it a radius of one meter.  He liked to think of this boundary as something of an event horizon, even though that wasn't exactly true.  Along the "event horizon," the spell detected all incoming sound waves and noted their respective wavelengths, amplitudes, and periods or frequencies.  It was easier to measure period, but measuring frequency would save an extra step.  Ignoring frequencies that humans couldn't hear, the spell would then generate an anti-wave for each relevant datum.

As he drew, Zeke watched the encounter between the android waitress and rowdy drunks.  Though he couldn't hear it, it was very clear what was going on.  That raised a whole lot of questions for him.  For one thing, would an android even have the appropriate parts for that?  If they did, firstly: [i]why[/i], and secondly: who would even want to do it?  He didn't imagine that it would be even the least bit enjoyable, but then again, he didn't even like girls to begin with, so he had difficulty understanding the situation at all.

Rolling his eyes and focusing back on his work, Zeke took a bite of biscotti, appreciating how the bitterness of the coffee tempered the sweetness of the biscuit.  Truly a pair made for each other.

His mind continued to wander as he drew, pondering various concepts and ideas.  Suddenly another man sat down right next to Zeke, startling him so badly that he dropped his whole biscotti into the cup of espresso, splashing liquid onto his nearly-finished circle.  He looked to his right, where the stranger sat - [i]inside[/i] the noise-cancellation bubble.