I was with Sara in a town on a big planet that I had designed. I was waiting for the sun to go down, because I thought sunsets looked particularly neat here because of the shading algorithm I had defined. It was going to be a while so we went for a walk outside of town (and here I wanted to link to a pic from D5.2a of 'the outside of town'—the area to the northwest that you'd go through to visit A-Day's city, but I might not have any such screenshots lying around). We walked on a path that went along a river, and through a strip of woods parallel to the river, and the sky was getting darker so we turned around and looked at the pretty colors, and as we passed through a tunnel (which the woods had morphed into), we looked to the side and saw patches of different Doom fluids—water, blood, slime, lava, and some new, more realistic and high-resolution lava textures. We dropped some burrs that had attached themselves to us, and within seconds full-grown plant sprung up. Not good! We don't like those plants! So we decided to do an experiment, and throw the rest of the burrs into the different fluids and see which ones managed to kill them. I was betting on the lava being the most effective.

Then that tunnel transformed into a party cave, deeper underground, and with just the high-res lava and not the other fluids. I call it a party cave because towards the entrance (and it was like Cave of the Mounds, where there is no natural entrance, just a man-made stairway that people use to come and go) there were several rooms with couches and tables and groups of people hanging out and drinking beer and stuff. Past those rooms it was more raw and cavelike and lava-ey, but still had pretty accessible walking paths and seating.

I was sitting on a couch looking at the lava and looking at my texts. I realized that I had unread texts from Shaina, who had been in this same cave at the end of the world. She and a bunch of other people had voluntarily been in there as the temperature rose and rose and eventually cooked everyone. Presumably it hadn't been any better outside, so there had been this feeling of let's party like there's no tomorrow because there isn't (I guess I survived because I was on a different planet at the time). She had sent me pictures of people dancing in a circle on an outcropping of rock surrounded by lava, and a selfie where her face was melting off, but yet she was smiling.

I felt a little bad that I hadn't seen these messages when she sent them. It would have been nice for her to feel that bit of connection while she was dying. But then I had the idea that maybe some fragment of her phone had survived the heat, and so I set out to look for it, referencing the pictures she had sent me to estimate where she might have spent her last few minutes. The furniture was all different, the old stuff having been burnt/melted along with everything and everyone in the cave, but the layout of the cave was pretty much the same. The selfie had been taken at an earlier counterpart to that couch by the lava that I'd been sitting on, near the dancing circle. I looked around there, walked back through the party area, and back to the lava-ey area again. I didn't find anything.