Sorry about the delay in updates folks! Stupid computer wouldn't read my hard drive... So without further ado...MASS UPDATES!

"I need it."

"No."

"Please!"

"No."

"I demand..."

"Sherlock I will dye your hair pink and duck tape you to the ceiling and send multiple pictures to Anderson and Donovan."

"You wouldn't dare."

"Try me."

"I need a cigarette!"

"For the love of interesting cases, Sherlock, shut the hell up!"

Sherlock sulked. Pete, oddly enough, 'nuzzled' Sherlock with sympathy. He tossed their 'pet' a cheap romance novel Joan kept in the flat for the thing.

"It's your own fault you know. You bet that you could go cold turkey on your cigs and even paid the local tenders to not sell to you."

Sherlock's sulking got worse. He was suffering from tobacco withdrawals.

"You could admit defeat here and now. I don't know why you even made that silly bet with Lestrade in the first place."

"Give me something. Anything."

"For your addiction or your boredom?"

"Both. Either."

"Sherlock, if you're going to be a child then go take a walk," said Joanna, not looking up from her computer.

"What are you doing?"

"Hm. Hacking for MI6. Their usual idiots are all either sick or under evaluation again. They sent me a tidy sum to keep their agents alive."

"I can't believe you were able to hide that you're MI6 from me."

"To be fair, not even Mycroft caught it until Adler got on my nerves. You'd be surprised how useful off-the-books agents are. Discreet and we don't really read as agents in the first place."

Perfect for quick undercover work. People like Joanna walked in and the bad guys all thought that they had stumbled into something they shouldn't, only to find the entirety of the royal marines on their arse.

Or in Joanna's case, they had a run in with the Black Iris and ended up dead after she interrogated them for hours.

"I'm bored."

"Sherlock I swear to magic I will force you to endure boring pop culture references for a week if you don't shut up!"

Finally the bored genius couldn't take it anymore. He walked out and went looking for something to kill time until something interesting came up.

He came back several hours later covered in blood with a harpoon in his hand.

Joanna took a picture, sent it to Lestrade (who kept it in his copy for Sherlock-related insanity...he had quite a few he shared with her when she agreed to keep track of it) and ignored him.

She finished her minor job and grabbed the paper. Sherlock was driving her absolutely batty with his eccentricities.

He went looking for his secret stash, unaware she hid them on the ceiling while he was out, under a spell.

Be funny to see his look when she commented on him being so...obvious.

However she put a stop to it when Sherlock upset Mrs. Hudson.

"What the bloody hell was that about?"

"You don't understand."

"Go after her and apologize or I won't tell give you a mystery to take your mind off the bet."

Sherlock glared at her.

"I need a case!"

"You solved one, with a harpoon and a dead pig apparently!"

"Well either we find a case or I'll break out Cluedo again!"

"Bloody hell you will! I'd sooner challenge you to Wizard's chess than play Cluedo against you again! To say nothing of other mystery games!"

"...You play chess?"

"Wizard's chess. I have a set upstairs," said Joanna irritably. "As well as Go, Shogi and mahjong."

Sherlock was half a second from demanding a game when the doorbell rang.

Joanna had a feeling it was going to be one of those cases.

A few hours later...

A discreet check on the internet revealed that it wasn't a werewolf attack that had traumatized the poor man. The moon had been waning, not full. From the description it sounded like a large dog, or to the uneducated person, possibly a wolf.

Except Joanna knew full well that there were no wolves in England. At least, none that weren't indirectly tied to the werewolf packs. Most wolf packs had gone under the protection of the werewolves to avoid the hunters, or had integrated themselves into their homes as 'pets'. Most packs had established territory that stayed 'in the family', and she had a list of the areas to avoid during full moons.

Dartmoor was not on that list.

"Don't mind him, he's a bit cranky lately," said Joanna absentmindedly.

"Would you mind driving Joan?"

"Of course," she replied. Finally, something to shut him up for a while.

"Bit odd innit?"

"What?" asked Sherlock.

"The word he used. Hound is a bit archaic for today's language."

"So you did pick it up. I agree."

"Could be an acronym he remembered, not even realizing it."

"Another one of your odd similarities Joan?"

"The Hound of the Baskervilles is one of the more well remembered titles in the series. Been a while since I've read it though. So how are you planning to get into Baskerville?"

Sherlock brandished a very important looking badge.

"Swiped it off of Mycroft did you?"

"Of course I did."

"Or we could do the smart thing and not have to listen to him bitch about you stealing his badge and use mine."

"What?"

Joanna reached into her pocket and brandished her own.

"Off the record MI6, remember? My clearance is the same as his, I just don't use it."

"Where's the fun in that?"

"I suppose I could say it's a joint operation, so long as they scan my card first."

Sherlock found she wasn't joking, as they waved them on through once they swiped her card.

"How is it that someone who doesn't work officially for MI6 has that high a clearance?"

"It's a long story, one best used to distract you with later," she replied without hesitation.

"What do you actually do for MI6?"

"Mostly I take up the Double Oh-Seven call sign, even if they use another one. They send me into dangerous zones where I heal up any idiots who got hurt, hack into things their people can't, and occasionally I get an assignment after I've already taken it."

Translation: I patch up the amateurs, perform high level hacks, and assassinate people only to get permission after the fact.

And she did it all without once falling into the trap the last bunch of idiots who took up the 007 call sign did upon receiving it.

Ever since they published that blasted series any male who took up the call sign tried to emulate the famous secret agent and would always get laughed out of the "official" circles of similar agencies when they found out their call sign.

Hence why they did the smart thing after the tenth such fool and assigned it only to high ranking female agents. Joanna was just the first who happened to be a bisexual who leaned towards females on top of it, and she was always picky about her partners. And why she was equally quick to arrange a second call sign for when she had to do official work after the fact.

There was more than one reason she took up the call sign "Black Iris", and it had nothing to do with her name or heritage. Even if she only acted after some poor bastard pissed her off enough.

Sherlock pouted, even as he pretended to be Mycroft to get away with entering the facility.

They might have swiped Joan's card first, but he still needed a fake ID to enter. As the master of coming up with bullshit lies that people could believe, their "official" reason for being there was an inspection to see if the testing facility had anything useful MI6 could borrow in a mission that was to happen soon.

Perfectly reasonable and not really something the general in charge of the place could throw them out for.

Even if they did have to make themselves scarce because of...well, it was Sherlock. The man had an uncanny knack for pissing off anyone in authority just because.

Sherlock practically cornered his flatmate with a look in their shared room.

"Details. Now."

Joanna rolled her eyes.

"Fine. Remember how I kept hinting I knew who Black Iris was?"

Sherlock looked at her with such intensity she got shivers. Whether he noticed or not was up for debate.

"You know how I have the call sign of a famous secret agent that's publicly mocked by everyone who takes that sort of thing seriously?"

Sherlock nodded, before he got what she wasn't saying.

"You have to be joking."

"Well what did you expect me to do, live with that ridiculous call sign and end up the butt of god knows how many stupid jokes about being given it? I gave them a secondary one that everyone assumes is the real call sign, but I rarely bother with it because the main purpose of being 007 is to keep other idiots from becoming an embarrassment to the entire agency!"

It was the main reason they paid her handsomely for doing almost nothing, save for a few odd jobs that didn't take too long and almost never involved widespread criminal conspiracies.

Well, outside of the morons who pissed her off that just happened to be involved in them.

"And the club?"

Joanna's face was full of dark mirth.

"Well how else was I supposed to explain how I got all those anti-magic bullets and guns to shoot them without having to go through so many channels? Besides, ending Riddle and Dumbledore gave me enough notoriety to use the name Black Iris instead of 007. They mostly keep quiet about it because they know the real reason."

"So the odd hack that flashed Moriarty's face along with the official sign of Iris being unhappy with someone?"

Joanna snorted.

"He pisses me off just by existing, and if he ever does something to really end up on my shit list I will not stop until his entire organization is in ashes. No one messes with what's mine," said Joanna with such conviction it made Sherlock shiver.

She noticed it, but like him said nothing.

Later that night...

"Ugh. What is that horrible chemical smell?"

She had paused mostly because she thought she saw someone signaling in Morse code, but the letter made absolutely no sense.

UMBRA might have meant something to do with the dark, but UMQRA?

The deeper she went into the hollow, the stronger the faint chemical smell became. It wasn't a full moon, she had her wand on her (not that she needed to worry since they had pretty much wiped out the dementor population during the war) and this was more or less a mundane population since any witch or wizard would have moved the second they connected this "hound" with the word werewolf. Well, that or a Grim, but werewolf was a much more credible threat to the populace and most would have left the area rather than risk it.

Besides, she had never been afraid of the dark.

She found the two men wandering around looking half terrified out of their wits (Sherlock appeared to be holding his cool enough to fool most).

However once they got back to the inn, Joanna did the smart thing.

She dragged Sherlock up to their room where if he had a mental breakdown from the stress that came with fear, it wouldn't be leaked back to Mycroft.

He was trembling. Actually trembling.

"Sherlock, look at me."

His eyes were wide, his skin feverish. He was having trouble holding the scotch she had ordered earlier.

She listened patiently to his ramblings, before she calmly put her hand on his. Strangely, it seemed to calm him down...just a little.

"Sherlock, it's a drug."

"What."

He looked at her, almost as if memorizing her face. He looked for something to quantify his fear, to rationalize why he felt it. He found a sea of calm in the storm of unreasonable terror...and he drew strength from it. So long as his Doctor was calm, he could fake it long enough for her to deal with it.

"When we were in the hollow, I caught a rather unpleasant smell of something chemical and definitely not natural in origin. I also found a drum that looked like it had been exposed to the elements for a while."

"Why aren't you affected by it then?"

If it was a chemical drug, then she should have been exposed as well.

Her smile was dry, but warm.

"When you've been through as much crap as I have, the idea of a spectral hound with glowing red eyes can be considered rather boring."

She'd faced down Fenrir Greyback himself on a full moon and calmly put a hollow-point anti-magic bullet into his head. After facing the sort of warfare magic could bring, the most a spectral hound of death was going to do for her was a "Meh, I've seen better".

Clearly the drug she caught the vague hints of in that hollow was meant to amplify a fear response. Couple that with a random dog or other shadowy figure, and you have the right cocktail to inspire some pretty strange stories.

Besides, her animagus form and the fact she still had that mixture of basilisk venom and phoenix tears meant her body broke it down into it's base ingredients and neutralized it before it could bother her. Couple that with her own life experiences and it was unlikely whatever this was would elicit the reaction it's creator wanted.

"Though this does give me an idea of how to handle our client's nightmares."

A measured dose of a calming drought might be enough to counteract whatever the hell this was. That or dreamless sleep.

Sherlock drew on Joanna's calm nature, and the trembling slowly subsided. So long as she was unafraid, he could rely on her to get through whatever it was.