"Aqua Chompa!" Swampy shouts out.

Water bubbles around his mouth and coalesces into wickedly sharp fangs protruding from his mouth. He slashes his head down over the fairy and bites into it. Water goes spewing everywhere as it takes out the fairy.

The fairy goes tumbling down and hits the ground.

"It wasn't...supposed to go...like this..." it whimpers before turning into specks of light that drift into the air.

Swampy was taking deep breaths. Despite the decisive victory, they seemed worn out. Ethan scrambled over to them.

"Are you okay? What was that?" He asked.

"I'm fine, hm hm. It was a good thing you figured out how to make me evolve when you did. But now I'm...very tired..." Swampy slumps over and glows again, its form changing back to that of a baby alligator inside of a half-broken eggshell.

Swampy goes to sleep.

Ethan doesn't quite know what to do, so he scoops up Swampy and leans back against a tree. His leg still hurts a lot, and he has nowhere to go. He hears some rustling in the jungle, and braces himself for what must be another animon coming to attack him.

Ethan tries to hide.

He does a pretty good job of hiding himself and Swampy in the thick jungle. To his surprise though, it's not animon that come out of the jungle into the clearing, but the kids he'd seen earlier. There are four of them, and each one is accompanied by their own monster — animon, he corrected himself. That must be what all of these creatures are in this strange world.

"I could have sworn I heard someone shouting." One of the girls says.

Ethan keeps his mouth shut. He doesn't know if he can trust these kids.

"There was definitely a fight here. Look, there's blood." One of the boys points to where Ethan was bitten by the fairy. "Animon don't bleed. That has to be a person. We have to help them!"

"Right, let's—" she was cut off by a ringing sound. She pulled out her own ani-tool, which looked identical to Ethan's. She pushed a button and his own ani-tool started ringing in response. Ethan fumbled at his pockets and stumbled out of his hiding place with Swampy, trying to simultaneously hold his animon and silence the ringing.

"Oh!" The girl said. "It's you! I've seen you around school before. You have an animon too! I didn't know there were more of the chosen around." Her eyes lit up while she talked.

"I don't know what you're talking about. Chosen? Animon? What is this place?" Ethan asked while his vision went hazy. He looked down at his leg. It was still bleeding. It had been a while, and that probably wasn't good.

"He's hurt." The boy said. "Lay down, we have to stop the bleeding." Ethan recoiled. He didn't like getting help. He tried to take a step back, tripped, and fell over.

While he was down, the other kids caught up and found them. There were two girls and two boys overall. Ethan recognized them from school, but didn't know any of their names. He recognized that one of the boys was one of his bullies. That kid kept pretty quiet while the others fussed over his leg. Eventually they got it wrapped up and stopped the bleeding.

"I'm fine, I'm fine." Ethan kept trying to brush them off, but they were having none of it.

The girl kept prodding him with questions that he couldn't answer, like how long he'd had an animon and how he was chosen.

"I told you, I don't know anything. I just saw you talking and then I was here, and then this...thing...an animon, I guess it called itself, attacked me. And then Swampy...I mean, this other animon, came out of nowhere and helped me. Not before it got my leg though."

Ethan shut his mouth. He was already oversharing.

The girl pursed her lips. "That's odd. You came with us when we transitioned, but wound up pretty far from us. And your partner found you already hatched, we all found ours as eggs."

"Anyway," she continued, "you're one of us now! That makes us friends, right everyone?"

The others, minus the bully, all said yes, but Ethan shook his head.

"You're not my friends. I'm not one of you. I just want to go home." He brushed them off again and tried to stand. "How...how do we do that? We can do that, right? Using the ani-tool?"

The girl looked downcast that he'd rejected their friendship so easily. "Yeah." She said. "We can go home, but...why won't you be our friend?"

He looked at her and winced. He couldn't relate to people like this that could make friends so easily. "You wouldn't get it." He said finally. "Now how do we get out of here and never come back?"

The others all looked at him like he was crazy. "Never come back?" One of the boys said. "Dude, you're one of the chosen now. You have an ani-tool and a partner to prove it. How can you not be excited?"

"I don't know what any of that means!" He shouted. "It's like you all got some explanation and I didn't, okay? I just got dropped into here and was almost eaten. By a monster. Animon. Whatever. Now my stuffed animal is talking to me and saving my life, and a bunch of kids from school that hate me are telling me I'm one of them? Give me a break." Ethan shouts back at them.

The girl looks on the brink of tears. "You think we hate you? We don't—"

"Yeah, I do think that, actually." He tells her. She looks devastated. "At least one of you does, anyway." He gives a glare towards his bully, who glares right back. "Now how do we get out?"

"Use your ani-tool. There's a reverse transition function." The girl mumbles at him.

Ethan takes out his ani-tool again and taps at it. He doesn't really know how to use smartphones or other technology all that well, but he finds a button labeled "Reverse Transition".

He presses the button without another word, is enveloped in light, and vanishes from the Animon World, taking Swampy with him.