There is a universe big enough for half a dozen towns to dot the countryside and still not be crowded, but small enough to walk from one end to the other in one very tiring day. In this little universe, somewhere near the middle, there is a farming village. It is not a high-tech farming village. The earthen ovens stand apart from the houses and need to be warmed with fires before they can bake anything; the houses, when they need light, are lit by oil lamps. And yet, it... doesn't look like a village at its tech level. One of the houses seems carved from a single piece of stone, engraved with a repeating pattern that would be hell to do by hand and looks precise enough to have been done by machine, albeit slightly eroded since then. The others are wooden, and newer, and one of them has a porch decorated with diamonds and rubies. The water tower nearby is colored almost like an easter egg.
On this particular day, one woman is picking blue wool from the bush it grows on; two others, one of them blind, discuss study design in sign language.