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His own snorting had awakened him, an empty bag of chips floating gently from his snout into his lap with nary a rustle.

He twisted in his seat, the ponderous rolls of his gut making him grunt with exertion.  Sweat began to bead on his forehead as his stubby arm grasped for the next bag of crunchy junk food stashed in the aft section of his cockpit.  It was his emergency stockpile, for long space flights like this, when he might need a snack; otherwise he'd not be bothering with this sort of aerobics.

With a muttered curse, he succeeded in flipping open the latch of the supply box -- originally intended for first aid equipment -- only to burn his greedy hand as it plunged blindly inside to search for his treats.

"That stupid...  Power thing!"

Why had he stolen that in the first place?  To spite the Star Fox team?  His quarrel with them was honestly not worth risking his neck for a stupid thing like this.  To try and get back into good graces with Wolf?  No, the answer was the same.  And now he's stuck his hand into it and it burned him; pretty badly, in fact, and now he regretted having left the first aid supplies behind.

He nevertheless fished around inside the compartment, having twisted about the other way and using his other hand, retrieving a bag of cheese-flavored-product-covered puffs of something.  Then he collapsed back in his seat, puffing from the exertion that series of actions placed on his failing body.

"My body..." He'd been dreaming.  Dreaming about her again.  "Stupid..." But his mind wandered as he struggled with the hermetically sealed mylar bag.

In his twentieth year, he had been a different person than the Pigma of today: young, strong, with an athletic body and handsome face.  He had no problems attracting the attentions of women, unless you counted being flirted with constantly to be a problem.  Pigma certainly did.

For, despite his excellent track record at the Academy and peak physical shape, the canny observer would have noticed a certain deficiency in young Pigma's social abilities.  He shied away from the affections of the Academy females; he kept to himself, studying Fleet regulations long into the night, or reading books.  He kept strong ties to his admittedly overbearing mother, and tended to let her make decisions for him.

His one outlet was another young porcinoid, a female named Candy.  To him, she was like a sister, one whom he could confide in, and spend long hours talking about whatever.  He absolutely adored her, though she wished, not so secretly, that she could turn his affection to something more than simple brotherly love.  In the end, she simply grew apart from him, finding another young man, who, while being less suitable, was interested in her in the way she wished a young man to be.  Pigma never came to understand what he had lost for many years.

Despite the setback in love, he graduated from the Academy with high marks, doing proud the memory of his father, the late Major Thaddeus Dengar.  He'd been assigned to a fighting unit, mostly running routine patrols around Aquas until he was picked for special assignment under the recently promoted Col. James McCloud.

That was really something.  As a young Lieutenant, he, and many others like him, had been keen on showing off his skills, demonstrating that he knew the regs inside and out.  Or he would have been, except for one thing, one item of personality review that had never made it onto his official record: Pigma Dengar was a coward, through and through.  Oh, he'd flown dangerous missions and come out on top during training, but it was always training.  That fact kept his courage up while he cruised through the Academy.  By the time he'd made it to actual flight, he'd figured out how to finagle his way out of anything that could be remotely dangerous.  He honestly hoped to live out his military career in relative obscurity, maybe get a promotion for doing nothing wrong long enough, and end up behind a nice, safe desk.

But when he was picked for the Star Fox team, he found himself against a wall.  He couldn't outright object to the assignment: it would be suspicious for someone so qualified to not want so prestigious a position.  And his preliminary protests of "surely, sir, you can find someone more qualified" were met with chuckles at the porcinoid's modesty.  No, he was the one for the job, and they were counting on him.

So he found himself later that day meeting the other two team members.  He was very honored, sir, to be meeting with such a well-known Colonel, and deeply humbled to have been chosen for this assignment and what might that assignment be if you don't mind my asking, sir?  It was of course classified until they were well en route to Venom.

Venom.  Pigma shuddered, spewing orange cheesy substance involuntarily onto the control stick of his ship.  He hated that place more than any in the galaxy.  It was the source of all his problems, the place where everything went wrong.

Because he had found out what their mission was.  They had to fly deep inside known pirate territory, inside territory claimed by insurgents beyond MacBeth, risking their lives for nothing more than a reconnaissance mission.  Corneria couldn't see through Venom's thick, poisonous clouds with their intel satellites, and any that had penetrated the morass were never heard from again.

Everyone now knew what had happened on that mission.  He betrayed the team, betrayed his home, and James had died.  But it was all that Peppy's fault, Peppy Hare, the one civilian on the team, longtime friend of the McCloud family.  He'd ruined everything.

The mission had gone well.  They'd gotten inside the space easily, entered Venom's atmosphere thanks to modifications built into their prototype Arwing fliers.  They'd flown right up to the insurgent base before they'd been noticed.  That was when Pigma panicked.

He had seen an opportunity to save himself.  And Peppy had to step in and try to stop him.  Pigma clutched at his control stick with grubby fingers, feeling the old anger course through him.  It would have worked, and no one would have had to die...

Well, it had served stupid James right anyway, for making him go on that mission.

At that point, he'd only had one choice.  Having turned his back on his home (and stupidly leaving Peppy alive to bring back said news), he asked to be allowed to join the insurgents.  He was, after all, an accomplished pilot, and someone with direct knowledge of Fleet workings.  They had said, "We'll see," and dropped him into their holding cells.  There he spent the first of many nights that would teach him the meaning of the word 'miserable'; he was all too glad to accept the terms given him by Andross.  The ape frightened him more than any person he had ever met, and Pigma became quite the willing servant.

This was the time when he discovered food.  Sure, he'd enjoyed meals in the past, but never considered eating as more than something to be done to keep oneself healthy.  Here on Venom, he found food to be his one friend.  It comforted him when he was lonely or sad.  When he had taken another beating at the hands of Andross or one of his underlings, he could turn to food, and everything would be all right.  At least, for a while.

He'd lain low during the first attack against their compound.  He wasn't trusted yet, still working his way up the ranks to where he'd be useful.  He weathered the assault, just as everyone else did, cursing the name of McCloud the entire time.  When the order came to retreat to the backup base, he made certain he was one of the first to relocate.  Then he began to make himself useful.  They'd gotten all his military knowledge when he first arrived, but he had other skills.  He convinced them to reverse engineer a new fighter from his old Arwing prototype -- the new Arwings that had attacked the base were almost an entirely different design, they were so advanced, and Andross' forces had nothing to compare in speed, firepower, or maneuverability.

And when Andross had decided that a full-fledged attack on the Lylat system was needed, Pigma was the first to suggest bringing together the best pilots they could find from the pirates and assembling a strike team to counteract Star Fox, who would no doubt be called in once again to defend Corneria.

Pigma snorted.  That hadn't gone as planned, and it certainly hadn't been his fault.  Leon and Wolf, who they named the fighters after, were good, for sure, as was he himself.  But he didn't have the mettle to be an effective close-range fighter.  He was driven simply on fear.  And then there was Andrew, the spoiled brat who had the misfortune of being related to Andross.  He couldn't do anything right, and Andross knew it; his plan was to have Andrew get into some sort of 'accident' while out in space, relieving him of the burden of watching the boy.  Unfortunately, Andrew proved to be just competent enough at fighter combat that he didn't die, a fact which caused Emperor Andross no end of frustration.

But that wasn't the only hitch.  No, the biggest problem was the team itself, if it could have been called that.  Wolf was too domineering, Leon too creepy, and neither had liked either Pigma or Andrew.  Andrew decided his best bet was to not like Pigma as well, in order to perhaps gain favor with the other two.  And so the pig found himself receiving even worse treatment at the hands of his comrades than he ever had at Andross' compound.  From verbal to physical abuse, Pigma became more withdrawn and miserable than ever before.  He was blamed for every one of their failures, his ideas and insight ignored.  That had been Wolf's fatal mistake: ridicule and punishment notwithstanding, if Pigma had simply been listened to, they wouldn't have fallen to McCloud's team.  He knew them, knew how they thought, how they fought.  And Wolf simply treated him like a fat imbecile.

So it was really no surprise that, after their ultimate defeat at the hands of Star Fox, Pigma flew himself away from Venom as quickly as he could and didn't look back.  He spent a number of years gaining weight and feeling sorry for himself on Zoness, then returned to space in a junked fighter he refitted on his own.  And now, here he was, adrift in the middle of nowhere with an alien power source and no real plans for the future.

But that was his problem, wasn't it?  He'd never had any plans, never knew what he wanted to do with himself.  He let his cowardess get the best of him, let it ruin his chance at a decent military career.  He was nothing but an obese, cowardly wreck, the crumbled shell of a man who had once been hardy, who had once had a future.  How far he had fallen.

Trails of snot and tears oozed from his face and mixed with the orange cheese-like substance on his shirt.  And the power source behind his chair flared for a brief moment, before extending a tendril towards the control panel.