Town on the Pointy End of the Lake is a quiet place. It's the sort of town that you visit while taking a ramble through the Uncomfortably Foggy Island countryside, and promises yourself that you will come back to live here, because the place is quiet and the people friendly. The lake is clear and deep, and the weather is as good as anywhere on Uncomfortably Foggy Island.

And then you get back to the city, with it's convenient transit system and more than one restaurant and electric grid that has been updated more recently than 100 years ago, and you forget all about Town on the Pointy End of the Lake — or if you don't, you do your research and move to View of No Snakes instead, because they have a four-times-a-day bus to Western Port City, which has a train to everywhere, and View of No Snakes is a perfectly nice place, anyway, and you can always visit Town on the Pointy End of the Lake on a day trip, since it's only about 130 minutes up the old trade road into the mountains.

So nobody moves to Town on the Pointy End of the Lake, and only slightly more leave, and the town persists in much the same way that it has since people settled on the bank of the clear, deep mountain lake.

All of this isn't to say that Town on the Pointy End of the Lake isn't a lovely place to live, because it is. But it is the sort of place where you can see all the buildings just by climbing a hill, and see the people going to Atraska's house for breakfast, because she always makes pastries, and they pay her with wool from their sheep that they graze up on the rise. The children run barefoot, clad in skirts in the summer and thick woolen jumpers in the winter. The local doctor treats more cows than he does humans, but it's fine — we're all mammals here — and any serious cases get referred down to 'the big city' (no need to disambiguate which one; there's only one in reasonable driving distance on Torvash's fancy new car).

But for all its pastoral charm, Town on the Pointy End of the Lake does have modern þereminian amenities: it has a high-voltage AC line to the hydroelectric dams in the mountains, and only a few power-outs in the winters to stress the backup batteries buried under the town office. It has a local school, and frequent bus trips into the city for field trips. It has a Network connection (two, actually: a buried fiberoptic line and a backup satellite link).

All this means that Town on the Pointy End of the Lake is not unpopular with the tourists. But they usually get their tourists in the summer, when the weather is nice and the terrain is traverse-able, and not in the middle of the 31st month, when the snow piles deep and fresh against the buildings, and bundled villagers in cable-knit sweaters visit each other for tea, and to grumble about the cold.

But the 4,1055 tourist season, it turns out, is not yet over.