In a modern world adorned with thousands of years of advances in science and magic fueled by humanity's insatiable desire to understand more about their world, two cities stand as models of the kinds of utopias that humanity could achieve, that is if they were to stop fighting for pretty much any given length in time. Despite concerted efforts across thousands of years, humanity has been unable to tame the desires and motivations that drive them to conflict thus while advanced magic and technology has made what was once a hostile frontier a relatively safe, well explored, and well populated home, the nations and states of this modern world have found maintaining alliances a challenging prospect giving rise to numerous conflicts in a somewhat predictable cycle. Despite the apparent futility of their efforts, those running both The City of Magic and The City of Technology exert a kind of soft power by allowing outsiders to come in and freely study from their documented advances in their areas of study and development in addition to exporting their knowledge and technologies in an attempt to bring the rest of the world in on their own little utopias.
The City of Technology is a geographically isolated megacity with a population in excess of 100 million. Virtually every function of the city is entirely automated from the production facilities that provide food to the citizens and guests to the mass transit systems that shuttle scientists, researchers, historians, and whomever else desires to visit the city to and from their homes on a daily basis. At the very center of the sprawling city nested between superstructures of varying functions is a complex that houses the core offerings of The City of Technology; a library filled with both knowledge extending back to when the world was an untamed frontier as well as memories from people across that time in addition to a secretive research and development division where troves of people work together to develop the new technologies that they invariably export to the rest of the world. This facility is the operations center for the system that maintains all of the city's automations; the android known as the Advanced Cybernetics Engine, A.C.E. While A.C.E. manages functionally the entire city, there is one domain that A.C.E. does not control, and that is the complex web of relationships the city has with the outside world. For those negotiations both between groups of people and other various nations, the city has a select family of representatives and their android assistant, M.A.G., assisting them in negotiations.
Their sister city, The City of Magic, is significantly smaller and completely focused on the pursuit of understanding magic. The City of Magic is governed by a council; each seat is responsible for maintaining a different section of the city with most being dedicated to studying and understanding a different school of magic and a few dedicated to more general needs of the city's inhabitants. While the city is populated by only a few hundred thousand citizens at best, the actual number of people present within the city at any given time often exceeds 2 million as the city hosts many guests that aim to learn magic in general or further their abilities with their specific craft. The city itself can be moved and is somewhat frequently relocated to observe different phenomena or otherwise better align the city with natural sources of mana to better supplement the mages present attempting to learn.
A.C.E., M.A.G., members of the council and members of the representative family are just a few of those in this complex web of people simply doing their best to make the world a better, kinder place and while it's nice to think that their work would go uninhibited, there's many obstacles that they face on the path to spreading peace. Narratives from this period will often involve the complexities that come with balancing a utopian society against the needs and desires of the individual.