We stood inside of my crumpled ship, looking at the smashed control panels and broken windows. It looked more like a movie prop than an actual vehicle that could be flown. 

James picked carfully through the parts, seeking out anything that could be used or salvaged. I shuffled awkwardly through the mess, hoping not to notice anything that reminded me of home too much. 

I leaned down and carefully picked up a shiny metal box. It was seemingly undamaged, and on the top it had the words EMERGENCY TRANSMITTER written in bold red letters. 

"James," I whispered, turning the box in my hands.

"What?" he poked his head out from some rubble and squinted his eyes at the transmitter. He shrugged and turned away again.

"Do you know what this is?" I smiled.

"Nope," he answered flat out. 

"It's a transmitter! If I can get it working, we'll be saved!" I laughed so hard I almost cried, all along it was right here in my hands!

"Those things don't work here," James chuckled from under a broken flight chair.

"What do you mean?" I scoffed, "These things work everywhere!"

"Not here," he dropped something with a loud bang.

"There must be something blocking the signal then, these things send messages into deep space all the time."

"The natives might have that kind of tech," James supplied, "but I've never seen them with anything like it."

"It could be underground," I mumbled, turning the box over and over again.

"That's where I go for the winter, so I guess that it makes sense."

***

I lay on the floor of the hut turning the transmitter on and off and on again. It refused to find an actual signal.  James was leaning out the door with a pair of binoculars trying to see into the camp of the notorious natives. 

He waved me over and passed them to me, pointing excitedly into the distance like a small child seeing an ice cream truck.

I raised the binoculars to my face and waited for them to focus. I saw nothing at first, but when I glanced past a few trees I saw it. The tall pink creature that James had described perfectly. It was hunched over a log eating something I couldn't see clearly. 

Some sort of cloth hung limply from its body in a feeble attempt to withstand the cool air. It looked up, only for a second, and it's giant black eyes seemed to be staring right at me.

I quickly dropped the binoculars and took a few steps back. "It looked at me," I stuttered.

"Yeah," he smiled. "They have this strange sense, they know where every living thing is. It can hear your heart beating from thirty miles away."

"It knew I was here?" I gasped.

"Not really," he shrugged, "all it knows is that you're alive. From this distance it probably thinks you're a fish in a pond." 

He was lying, I could tell. If I had just been a fish in a pond to the pink monster, it wouldn't have even glanced in my direction. 

"What are they really called?" I wondered. "The natives. What do they call themselves?"

"I can't say for sure, but I read somewhere before my computers died that humans called them crabs, because they were pink and grumpy." I smiled slightly at that. A massive dangerous species called crabs.