Sitting down on the stool, the doctor turned to face Sarge. His eyes examined the fur-covered body of the portly werewolf. "I do want to say thank you for allowing us to study you, Sergeant Wolf. You should receive compensation in the mail within a week's time."

Sarge gave a silent nod, doing his best to understand what the doctor was saying.

"With a few of the studies, and with a few scans of your brain, we learned that your brain's uh..." the doctor paused, trying to find a simple way to explain to Sarge, "your brain is busy fixing your body. This accounts for your lowered mental fortitude. While it isn't a proper way to denote someone's 'intelligence', the IQ test you did in the past was a helpful measure for us to know the difference in your capabilities then versus now."

Sarge tilted his head to the side. "Me... erm... I... don't understand."

"Exactly." The doctor nodded and sighed. "The previous IQ test you took before was... around 160. The one we had you take during the tests and examinations was barely capping at 60." The doctor took a deep breath. "I'll be telling your loved ones of this soon, but with a few more of the tests we learned about the regenerative ability of yours. During one of the scans, we found that the parts of your brain in charge of cognitive function fired off with a greater intensity while you healed up. Does this ring a bell to you?"

Sarge had to think on the sentence for several minutes. Each word came to him at a snail's pace before he picked apart the sentence to the best of his knowledge. "Me regenerates fast. Brain gets drunk-feeling when hurt... but Me's... erm... I've been hurt bad. Healing burns fat, but really bad injury burned all fat. I haves none left."

The doctor nodded as he swiveled on the stool and started typing notes onto the computer behind him. "You're saying that the fat you accumulate helps you heal faster?"

Sarge nodded. "Yessums. That is corrects."

Turning back around, the doctor grimaced. "Now... I want you to know this is a rare case. If we want to continue studying the effects this problem has on you... we may need to ask you to... uh... put on more weight."

Sarge's ears perked up. Looking down at his belly, he smiled. "I's been growing."

"Remarkably fast. Your lean mass is extremely dense for someone of your size, so you were already rather heavy... but previous pictures of you showed you used to be rather large. This all went away when you got that scar?" The doctor pointed at Sarge's chest.

Sarge nodded. "Fat burned to heal. Worse the damage, stronger the heal. This is the worst me have had... er... I have had since the mu... mu... uhm... mutation."

"Then, it sounds like you have a choice. You can either gain all that mass back you had and, hopefully, that should fix your - uh - loss of mental fortitude... OR you can keep yourself physically fit at the cost of being smart again." The doctor folded their arms and leaned backwards. "In any sense of the word, neither option sounds like a healthy one... but you're a medical oddity. I can't help but wonder what the long-term effects of this mental dampening will have on your cognitive functions. How permanent will it be? Will it go away?" The doctor rubbed their temples. "Regardless, I will see you for your next visit. Try gaining some weight back and see if that helps you think more clearly."

"How?" Sarge asked.

"How did you gain it all before?"

"Food. I ates many buffets."

"Then try that again?" The doctor shrugged.

Sarge smiled. He was now feeling rather hungry....

~~~~~

A bit of a stress-relief drawing. I needed to draw Sarge with a big belly. I won't go into details, but the last month has been overwhelming and stressful for me, so being able to get this out was rather helpful!

~~~~~

Sarge/story/art (C)  Juntarhenogu Me