Though Dante was now confident that he wasn't dead, at this point he wasn't sure how much comfort he could take from that.

[i]"You're in the digital world now - I've been told it's a dimension parallel to yours, and dependent on yours as well for its existence."

"All humans in the digital world are said to have digimon partners. I'd suggest finding them soon. Some parts of the digital world are quite dangerous, and not all digimon are open to discussion and reasoning."[/i]

"Hold- hold on." Information flew thick and fast and his beleaguered brain struggled to process it. They were in another world? There were more beings like the clione and the flying ball?? They were supposed to 'partner' with them???

He looked around, trying to reconcile what he was hearing with the apparent reality around him. Since he'd come to, two more people had regained consciousness, leaving the total number of individuals whose appearance didn't fill him with dread and confusion at four. There was the girl in a windbreaker who'd come to before him, who seemed significantly older than the rest and seemed to carry herself with something of a harder edge. The first of the others to come to was another boy with red hair similar to his own (and a posture that was very much [i]not[/i]), and the last of them was a boy with a slight frame who seemed about as lost as him; not in the least because of the green and purple creature that was apparently intent on making him her manservant.

Dante's gaze lingered on the strange insectoid being, still not quite believing his eyes as it- she, if the cadence of its voice was any indication- made demands of the other boy before pressing the other two unusual beings for information as the girl had. After a few moments had passed, he turned his attention to the other boy, noticing that, likewise, another strange creature had taken a fancy to him. This one also resembled a worm, albeit one with a cat's face and a reptillian frill, and while they didn't seem capable of speech as the others were, that did nothing to make them any less surreal to Dante's increasingly laboured perception of reality. Sensation returned with a vengeance as his thoughts began to race, weightless confusion threatening to give away to outright panic-

"Okay, okay." [i]No, Dante, keep it together.[/i] It seemed that all this wasn't a dying dream or a feverish hallucination, so it was time to ask some questions. In-between fighting off the onset of existential dread, he'd overheard the girl and the insectoid creature ask them for more information- one about the nature of the world they'd purportedly been thrown into, the other about the finer details of these alleged 'partnerships- but as his mind caught up with the situation the best it could, it seemed as if there was a crucial detail being overlooked.

"Why are we here?" He started off small, but a moment later and he blurted out. "Something summoned us? What for? Why us?" He very much doubted that whatever entity or force saw fit to snatch them from across dimensions did so without an ulterior motive or some purpose in mind, let alone some innocuous 'adventure' ripped from the pages of some twee storybook. But at the same time, why them? Why snatch four random children from across worlds without even bothering to explain their purpose beforehand?

Dante felt the dread creep back up on him again, but he did his best to beat it back down as he took a deep breath. And, as he awaited a response from the strange creatures, his eyes scanned across the clearing once more and zeroed in on something else questionable.

"Where are the other 'Digimon'?" So the insectoid creature and the absurd taxonomical nightmare seemed to be the partners of the two other boys, but that left himself and the tall girl in the windbreaker unaccounted for. Though they seemed to know more than was natural for a pair of purported interlopers, the clione and the blob didn't seem to be related to the other creatures. Then where were their partners?