He turned the key to shut off his engine, tucking his keys into the pocket of his swim trunks and grabbing a towel from the passenger seat before heading down to the beach. It was abandoned at the moment- there were more accessible places along the beach further down the coast, but he preferred it this way. Nobody around to bug him as he spent the day relaxing.
As he spread his towel out on the sand he saw something washing up on the beach not far away. It looked like an orange starfish. Curious, he got up and approached, looking over it for a moment. It was fairly large, almost a foot across from the tip of one of its five legs to either of its opposites. "Never seen on that big before..." he murmured to himself as he leaned down to pick it up and throw it back into the water, but just as his fingertips were about to touch the starfish, a sound stopped him.
"Hello."
He almost lost his balance from surprise, catching himself before he fell and looking around. There was nobody else on the beach, but it sounded like someone right next to him had spoken. "Er... hello?" He called, raising his voice a bit.
"Hello again." The voice came, still sounding awfully close. Blinking, he looked a little closer at the starfish at his feet. There was a pinkish spot in the middle, looking almost like...
"Um... hello... How are you?" He asked the starfish, watching it closely. To his surprise, the pink spot- actually a pair of very human-like lips, he realized now that he was watching them- opened up and the voice he'd heard came from the creature's mouth.
"I'm hungry, but aside from that I'm well," the starfish replied.
"Oh? What do you eat?" he asked, looking around again. This must have been some bizarre kind of prank... what the punchline was supposed to be, though, he couldn't tell.
"Algae and plankton, but at the moment I need protein."
"Protein, huh..." he mumbled to himself, his eyes locked on the starfish's mouth... it moved exactly like a person's... "How much?"