Back in the 1990s, a budding Marine Biologist by the name of Francine Krabbie was sailing her research vessel miles and miles off the shore of her Southern California home, when tragedy struck. What began as calm seas and bright, sunny skies turned to angry waves and gray storm clouds. Seeing only open ocean in all directions, Fran took cover when her ship capsized, and huddled in the hull as it floundered.

When her tiny craft went under, so did she.

Fran awoke on the shore of an uncharted island. Her ship was gone, but she was alive, and miraculously, she was not entirely all-the-way drowned. That miracle, she soon learned, had been provided by hundreds of tiny, intelligent and affectionate hermit crabs. They surrounded her on the beach in a rainbow of colors, shades and shells, and introduced themselves (by way of very complicated interpretive dance and rounds of claw-based charades) as the Crabbies. Specifically, the Crabbies of Crabbie Lagoon, found on South Crabbie Island, in the Crabbie Archipelago.

They told her that they had found her in the ocean, and that she must've gotten lost, because they didn't know any humans who lived in the ocean, so they'd done the neighborly thing and brought her back to the not-ocean. Since it was hard to carry things in pincers that you don't want pinched, they'd done the logical thing and built a simple little double-decker coconut tree raft with onboard medical facilities, a four-stroke outboard motor and a fondue fountain for emergencies. Fran, still suffering from the shock, didn't question any of this, but she avoided the fondue after she noticed the crabs didn't use sticks.

Fran spent weeks with the inhabitants of Crabbie Island, recovering from her experience and learning about the Crabbies themselves. She watched as the Crabbies connected and bonded, building kitschy little love nests out of flotsam and jetsam and stuff they ordered on eBay. She witnessed Crabbies trading strange woven junk with magenta oysters on the shore, returning home with tiny purple pearls that let them live forever. She met the Plankton Crabbies, scurrying around in a tide pool the size of a dinner plate, holding a local lottery to determine who got to live in the fancy bottlecap this week. She learned of the Northern Titanclaws, giant Crabbies that could uproot a palm tree if they felt that palm tree would look better, say, over by THAT picturesque waterfall, not THIS picturesque waterfall. They handled most of the gardening.

Once she had recovered, the colony of crabs offered her the raft to return home, on the condition that she never tell a soul of their existence, their secret island or how they had helped her. Fran offered instead to bring them back to the mainland with her and make them extremely famous and beloved by all. There, she promised, they would be safe from the dangers of improper fondue consumption and the rampaging Garlic Butter Beast that plagued their home. Best of all, there were loads of fancy new shells to try out — a detail which she had learned was basically more important than 90% of all other Crabbie activities.

This sounded like a much better deal to the crabs as a whole. They boarded their coconut rafts and cargo crates en masse, and they have been here ever since. Now, for the first time, you too can take home a Krabbie Crabbie, and experience the joy and warmth you've always secretly suspected was hidden in the heart of a crustacean.