Digimon Avatars

Digimon hatch from eggs called Digi-Eggs/Digitamas. (In the English language iterations of the franchise there is another type of Digi-Egg that can be used to Digivolve, or transform, Digimon. This second type of Digi-Egg is called a "Digimental" in Japanese.) They age via a process called "Digivolution" which changes their appearance and increases their powers. Some Digimon act feral-like. Most, however, possess large amounts of intelligence and human speech.

The first Digimon anime introduces the Digimon life cycle: they age in a similar fashion to real organisms, but do not die under normal circumstances because they are made of reconfigurable data. Old Digimon and Digimon who receive fatal wounds dissolve into infinitesimal bits of data. The data then recomposes itself as a Digi-Egg and the Digimon goes through its life cycle again. Digimon who are reincarnated in this way will sometimes retain some or all their memories of their previous life. However, if a Digimon's data is completely destroyed, they will die.