As the seemingly older of the two girls spoke up and placed herself between Dante and the blobs, he paused, before he stepped a little to the side. Whatever the gesture had been meant to achieve, he wanted a clear view of the creatures and what they’d supposedly taken; he still couldn’t make much else other than the shapes of their bodies from within the bubbles they’d summoned.

That, though, was interrupted yet again by the larger of the two blobs raising their- his?- voice. 

The first response that they threw back at the group was, as far as he could make sense of it, as much of a nothing as everything else they’d said up until that point. Worse than that, it was a selective nothing. It seemed that the boy who’d charged them was the only one they bothered to grace with their attention. 

Dante felt panicked anger spike up again; but thankfully, before he could do or say something he’d regret, the blob decided to finally give something resembling an actual explanation. 

"It's like my sister said-” So, he was a he after all? ”- you are in the digital world.” And then came the rest, a bevy of information ranging from helpful to patently absurd, all delivered with a face so straight that a professional poker player would have broken out in a cold sweat at the sight of it. 

It wasn’t a perfect explanation. It wasn’t even a particularly [i]good[/i] explanation, as far as Dante’s frantically angry mind was concerned. But nonetheless, it was an explanation and that same mind latched onto it like a man at sea clinging to the debris of his wrecked ship. Assuming he could trust their words and judgement, it really did seem like he wasn’t in England anymore: more than that, it seemed he wasn’t even on Earth anymore. He’d never heard of a ‘Digital World’, for one, even from his neighbours. His friends had mentioned similar things, but not in the same kind of possibly-senile, possibly-deluded context as the old couple next door. Those two hardly seemed as out of it as they had before, now that Dante was face-to-face with the exact same kind of situation they’d described countless times to him and his sister during their visits. On the other hand, he decided to push his friends and their own ramblings from his mind. After all, whatever bizarre situation he was in, he doubted it was that he’d been sent to and trapped inside an online game. 

The thought was possibly more chilling than anything else his terrified imagination could come up with. 

Nonetheless, he had to think conductively. And thankfully, the brother gave him some small reason to do so as he mentioned the villages. So there was somewhere that they could go. It was a start, even if it didn’t completely help them. 

The phrase ‘Digimon’, however, almost stopped his thoughts dead in their tracks. It explained the ‘partners’ that he’d been so curious about, but from that answer came another question. What was a Digimon? None of the possibilities that came to mind were particularly illuminating or appealing ones. One or two of them were even unpleasantly close to the same kind of eighth-grader nonsense from his friends that he’d tried to push from his mind. 

It wasn’t all that got pushed from his mind, however, as the thundering sound of something cracking [i]split[/i] the air and broke his train of thought. More than that, however, it seemed to finally break the nerves of the two blobs; and the moment he pulled himself back from wondering what in any world could have made such a horrible noise, he caught their last words to the group. 

“Wait!” But no sooner had he opened his mouth had he realized it was hopeless. The two creatures seemed even more spooked of whatever had made the noise than him, and had absolutely no intention of stopping to further help them as they charged off into the forest with their winnings. 

"Come on, let's go before they get away!" And as his mind turned back to the other humans present, it seemed it wasn’t just those two that had no intention of staying. Before Dante or anyone else could get a word in, the boy who’d charged the creatures before took off after them with reckless abandon. 

“Hold on!” This time, Dante didn’t bother to address the other boy: by the time he was able to compose his thoughts enough to talk again, he was far gone from his sight. Instead, he looked back and forth between the two girls who were still in the clearing. The other boy had been dead-set on taking his watch back, but what about these two? There were so many questions: but they remained unsaid as he asked the most basic one of all. “What the hell are we going to do?”