Mike applied as a foreign exchange student, and on a lark asked to be sent to a tropical island (which has the strange capability to briefly sink then and "pop up like a cork" every "few hundred years or so"). She found herself dumped on a forgotten, scantily mapped island populated by descendants of a British shipwreck. This island is called Albonquetine, named after one of their founders, Joshua Wendell Albonquetine. It may be based on the real-life Pitcairn Island. The castaways have "gone native" and are trying to behave like Polynesians, with varying degrees of success. Amongst other things, this explains Og's name and his fashion sense (or lack thereof).