Ms. Mina's "invigorating medicinal liquor" was clearly effective—or rather, far too effective.
After drinking the Hot Brandy, Sherlock visibly perked up. He truly displayed the "excessively abundant energy" he was always talking about but that was usually impossible to see.
On ordinary days, the Bureau of Supervision's consultant always used his powerful rationality to restrain his behavior. His occasional bouts of hypoglycemia also made him seem rather sluggish, leaving him listless most of the time.
It was a very contradictory trait. It made Sherlock's attempts to vent his excess energy rather awkward, like some kind of sudden fit of neurosis.
Sherlock was something of a celebrity on Glass Island, and many people knew his habits. He liked high-intensity work, such as complicated cases that forced his brain to run at full capacity. Complex or dangerous investigations worked as well.
But he alone disliked physical exercise, because Sherlock felt that pointlessly wasting energy was itself pointless.
Exercise required sugar to sustain it, while his hypoglycemia would leave his body weak and lower his mental vitality along with it.
Yet even so, his mind remained intensely excited, which gave Sherlock a headache—a physiological headache.
But now that he had drunk the liquor... As Sherlock himself had said, his intellect had indeed been disrupted by the alcohol. His intense excitement, pride, and curiosity all spilled out. Sherlock visibly became much more talkative.
After dragging Iver into a conversation about his grandfather, he began to ramble on about his own fascinating cases.
They were all cases he had solved privately and never told anyone about. Now, they made perfect conversation over tea.
Sherlock normally disdained telling people the details of those cases or explaining what work he had done. Yet his words now proved that he had never forgotten those matters; he had simply