This is for 5-minute-fiction, another prompt site (the one that brought you Blizzarded). This is, by the way, not the “Vas” setting, but the setting with the beagles of war.

They’d tried. By gum, they’d tried. They’d done everything they could to get off the stupid island.

You wouldn’t think it would be that hard; they were interstellar explorers. They were trained for survival situations far more dire than a tropical island with plenty of fruit and small local mammalian-like animals to eat; they had their kits with them, and between their knowledge, their kits, and the remains of the craft they’d landed in (if you could call it a landing), they should have been able to get off the damn island. They should have been able to rejoin the rest of the team; they should have been back on the shuttle by now and back to civilization. But every time they tried, /every time/, they found themselves buffeted back to the shore.

It was when they saw the footprints in the sand that Junie began to get an inkling of what was going on. It was ridiculous, of course, so she didn’t say anything, not until the cannibals landed.

Cannibals! They even looked mostly human! Sighing, she told Robert and Pat, “we have to rescue their captive.”

“Why?” Pat argued. “We’re not supposed to interfere, if there’s really a sentient species here.”

“Because that’s the way the story goes,” she answered, sighing.

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