As the others present slowly came to, Dante stayed focused on trying to remain sitting up. The warmth of the air seemed to invite him back down to the ground, but after the borderline oppressive heat of the July day he’d woken up in, it didn’t do much to succeed. It did, however, succeed in keeping his senses strained even as his vision remained clear, not unlike he’d woken up with an awful case of dehydration after a night of drinking. 

The bickering of the blobs remained inaudible at his range, but the voices of the other people present managed to reach his ears intact. A female voice nervously pounded out a question that managed to slip from Dante’s head like water through his fingers the very moment he heard it. Another female voice, older and deeper-sounding, mumbled something that didn’t even make it that far; if Dante was struggling with English in this state, whatever language was being spoken was an even bigger crapshoot. 

The last voice, however-

“OI! That’s my watch!” The sheer volume of the other boy’s shout was enough to startle Dante, and that was enough to make him fall to the ground. His shoulder and arm hitting the hard surface of the ground below, he bit back on a yelp that then became a grunt; and that was enough to force him out of his partial stupor. As he pushed himself back up into a crouching position and then quickly scrambled to his feet, he could hear and see well enough what was going on. 

The other boy was still on the ground, knocked flat on his ass after rebounding off the pink forcefield that had formed around the blob he’d charged. The blob in question seemed to be holding a cluster of small objects that he couldn’t make out from behind the pink barrier: on the other hand, both had raised their voices above their earlier bicker, and now Dante could make out what they were actually saying. 

“If I may, to answer some of your questions - uh, no, you're not dreaming, and you're not dead.”

That captured his attention entirely, completely distracting him for a few moments as the others began to react. If this wasn’t a hallucination, did this mean he was actually face-to-face with fair folk? His neighbours were always going on about strange phenomena, especially the strange creatures that apparently lived in the local countryside. Had they been right after all? Had he crossed some unseen threshold? Looking down, he could see that his bag was with him: was that evidence enough that he wasn’t dead, dreaming or seeing things like his aunt did after too much wine? 

"Blah blah, digital world, blah blah, adventure. Go find your partners already and, I dunno, have a good time or something. That's how the stories usually go." He came out of his thoughts just in time to catch that sarcastic ‘explanation’ from the blob; and as unhelpful as it seemed, at least it confirmed he was [i]somewhere[/i]. That was better than nothing, at least. 

But [i]anything[/i] was better than nothing; and besides that absolute mote of information, the explanation they’d just been given amounted to a big fat pile of nothing. As his brain became more and more free of its stupor, the reality of his situation finally hit Dante like a hammer to the face. 

“The hell kind of explanation do you call that?!” As sudden near-panic spurred him to speak up again, Dante’s voice was high and cracked, betraying his fear and age. But a moment later, he swallowed the saliva that had been nervously collecting in his mouth, and spoke again in a more level and calm tone. “We’re not fine. Where are we? How are we supposed to get home from here? What the [i]fuck[/i] are ‘partners’ even meant to be?”