On her 11th birthday in 2018, Alice finds a mysterious black box on the beach. She discovers it's called a C-Bean and imagines it belongs to her. Together with her five schoolmates - the only children on the newly re-inhabited remote island of St Kilda - they soon realise it has extraordinary powers and can transport them anywhere in the world, a power they use to learn to understand the world's ecosystem and to do something to save it.