Pirate Log 43762 Section 7

He spent a lot of time sleeping under heat lamps and eating, but he made sure he was awake whenever the High Commander came to visit. She said she was doing her job, since technically she had never been relieved of duty, only given a position on high command. Ridley respected this.
Occasionally, when he woke up, he would dreamily try to stretch and hurt himself. As angry as it made him to have his right wing bandaged and folded at his side, he knew that if he had been at home, in Norfair, he would be dead.
Painkillers were never a bad thing after they were administered. It was simply that he had an aversion to needles and it did not help that the only place one would puncture him was in the thin membrane on his wings. This meant frequent re-bandaging and pain, so they couldn't do it all the time. As such they had to give him massive doses or give him doses with greater frequency. The latter was not an option- if there was one thing worse than needles it was things touching his wings!
The result was a massive high after every shot and a low point where he was in great pain. Obviously they gave him shots at this point. So far he'd mutilated three interns.
He glanced over at the corner.
I should probably eat those sometimes soon or else they'll rot, he thought. Often he did not eat pirates he killed because other Pirates cleared away the corpses, but even though this was a hospital, it seemed no one was going to.
He opened his left wing to remind himself that he could and rolled his shoulder. It felt nice, so he tried with his legs and walked over to the bodies and promptly devoured them. His guards didn't seem disgusted.
He grabbed the last body with his teeth and dragged it across the floor to the corner with the heating lamp. He gnawed absently on the skull for a while, still slightly high, when the High Commander came in.
She swore. "What the hell have you been doing?"
"Eating," he mumbled through the meat. He watched one of his guards say a few sentences to his visitor, who nodded in understanding.
She approached Ridley and waved her hand in front of his face. Lazily, he bit at the moving target, but the hand was too fast so he went back to his lovely cadaver.
"I'll come back tomorrow," said the High Commander.
Ridley shook his head yes, stood up, walked in a tight circle precisely three times, and laid back down.
This is nice.

The New Guy watched Ridley with fascination, doing his best to hide his amusement.
The Norfairian had been pacing and flapping his left wing absently for at least ten minutes now. The Security chief continued to do so until a doctor and a scientist entered. The doctor asked, "How is he?"
The New Guy pointed, saying nothing. What was there to say.
"How long?" the doctor asked.
"Half an hour or so. Sometimes he speaks in Zebesian.
As if on cue, Ridley muttered some gibberish. The New guy noted thet every word Ridley said was an adverb, but he didn't say so out loud.
The doctor entered his notes onto his portable computer. New Guy sighed to himself.
"To be clear, he doesn't act like this normally?" The scientist asked.
New guy glowered at him. "No, and I'll be sure to tell him to said that."

The next day the Chancellor returned. Ridley was in a bad mood and was shredding some meat that had been given to him. He'd turned it from large slabs of meat to a substance that looked like ground beef.
"Feeling better?" She asked.
"I'm not high," he said, "But I hurt all over."
He spat some partially digested meat onto the ground, coughing with it a wad of phlegm coated Phazon.
He roared and kicked away the gooey wad with one of his hind legs before continuing the shredding.
"How are you feeling, then?"
"Like crap. I'm tired all the time and it hurts when I breath."
"Fun," she said sarcastically.
"Shut up," he snarled, swallowing a meat wad.

The next day, when Ridley had reached a low point and needed more painkillers, the doctors sent an intern to give him the shot. The intern got the wing unbandaged and the needle in partway before Ridley tried to pull his wing back. The intern managed to get all of the painkillers into Ridley in time for the Norfairian to crush the poor trainee's head like an egg.
Nice. Something to chew on.