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There was a thing Daughter knew how to do, although she did not know how she knew it. Daughter could send pieces of herself out of her body. These fragments were like tiny hot drops of liquid, yet each one was as heavy as a stone temple. These drops were hurled into a void surrounding her where they expanded and cooled, becoming large frozen shapes. They flew free of Daughter’s body, yet each shape remained connected to her by a thread which none could see. Not even Daughter herself with her own surrogate eyes in the shapes could see this thread.

Daughter saw her body was a globe of light, and her surface was covered in jets and loops of flame which erupted into the void. In the distance she saw countless others of her kind, but they were so dim that Daughter, who saw how her own light faded with distance, marveled how far across the void they truly were.

Daughter also saw other points of light that reflected the light that she herself made, and they were much closer than the others of her kind. She slightly fattened the link to one of her tools and let hot gas flow through. This gas then escaped into the void and caused the tool to move. As it responded to Daughter’s will and offered her the sense of sight, she lived through the tool vicariously, as though her body was free to move through the void. It had become her avatar, a manifestation in molecular chemistry of her nuclear chemistry self.

One of the objects that shone only with reflected light lay at a distance a hundred-fold greater than the width of the Daughter's body. Her avatar dropped below the cloud layer and cooled off in a world-girdling expanse of water. When the avatar emerged from the ocean it crossed over a land thickly covered with green trees. As she plowed through the vegetation Daughter observed frightened apes fleeing over the ground using all four limbs to move.

The avatar arced through the void and reached a grassy plain with a single mountain dominating it. Here Daughter saw another group of apes that walked erect. She changed her shape to watch. Hidden from their notice as a white rock, Daughter observed a burial ceremony for a newly dead hunter. Afterwards the apes polished elaborate bone tools with stone tools and repaired the animal hides they slept within during the hunt.

At night the apes entered a cave and a tendril from the avatar of Daughter snaked in to watch them. She saw a female ape apply pigment to the wall to produce a beautiful painting. Daughter also saw resin boiling in a pot over a fire. This resin was then used to fix a stone spearhead to a shaft for hunting.