Mist
Chapter Three
It wasn't long before Armsmaster arrived in front of several PRT vans. That didn't surprise Shadow Stalker in the least. Some people called him a glory hound behind his back, but he always struck her as more of a vulture. Hookwolf was a big name, and Armsmaster would make sure his own name was connected to the villain's capture, no matter how little he had to do with it.
"Shadow Stalker, in fifty words or less what happened?"
"I saw a shot, and I took it."
Armsmaster gave him a look that she couldn't read, but could still guess at. "I'll need more words than that."
Back in the old days, she didn't have to worry about submitting reports. She didn't have to worry about submitting, period. But the PRT wanted to make everything official, if only to punish people like her who actually did anything. "I was out on patrol—"
"You're lying."
"I was out on an unofficial patrol—"
"On your own?"
She gritted her teeth. "On my own. I was on my way back home."
"Another lie."
"I was taking the scenic route, okay?"
"Another lie."
She wanted to strangle him. She wanted to strangle most people she met, but right now she wanted to strangle him especially. "Look, could I just write up a report tomorrow morning?"
"Until my lie detector works on penmanship, let's keep it verbal."
Shadow Stalker took a deep breath. "I was wandering through the area, in costume, on my own, unsupervised, against regulation ... can I go on?"
"You may."
"When I heard gunfire. After I got here, I saw Hookwolf and a bunch of his henchmen fighting a cape."
"Who?"
"The cape? No one I know."
"What were his powers?"
"Her powers."
"You verified this?"
Shadow Stalker rolled her eyes. "I didn't ask her to take her clothes off, but she sounded female."
"Good," Armsmaster said, ignoring her sarcasm. "If this turns into another Circus fiasco, it's going to be a headache for everyone. Powers?"
"Mover, Shaker. She had some sort of telekinesis that she could apply to herself. She was able to take down the ordinaries, and I shot Hookwolf."
"With a tranquilizer?"
"You don't let me use anything else."
"And it got through his shell?"
"I phased it through."
"You phased it through," he repeated. "So right now Hookwolf has a handful of broken glass scattered throughout his internal organs. Do I understand that correctly?"
Shadow Stalker did her best to bite back a sarcastic retort, and failed entirely. "Oh, gee, sowwy mistuh about huwting the nice owd massmurdering Nazi dirtbag. I p-p-pwomise it won't happen again."
Armsmaster glared at her. He was a bit of a robot when it came to picking up on tone, but maybe the stutter was too much. "See that it doesn't. And the other injuries were caused by the other cape?"
She nodded. She had a reputation when it came to senseless violence—or at least unapproved violence—but it didn't apply here. "I didn't even touch those guys."
"You're lying again."
She rolled her eyes. "I tranqued them and tied them up, but that's it."
"... True." He sounded surprised. "Back to the other cape. Did she give you her name?"
"Nope. Said she didn't have one."
"Costume?"
"Indistinctive. Modified civilian wear. A hood and scarf."
God, she was going to be here all night, and then she was going to get into trouble for staying out all night. There wouldn't be any, "Good job on catching the bad guy!" Instead it would be, "You broke the rules we made up just to screw with you, but will let you off easy this time, just because you caught the villain we've been failing to tag for years. But don't let it happen again!"
"Age?"
She shrugged. "About mine, give or take."
"So Wards age. Did you invite her to join the team?"
"I told her about the Wards." That was technically true. "She ... she didn't seem interested in signing up."
"Not everyone is at first. But she did stay to talk to you after the fight?"
"Yeah."
He nodded. "Good. Try to reach out to her if you see her again."
"Yeah. No problem." It was an easy promise to make. The odds of running into the same cape twice were ...
WWW
Sophia shoved Taylor in the hallway, and her sprained ankle gave way, causing her to fall and catch herself on a bruised elbow. Her books scattered across the floor, and those who weren't actively ignoring her stopped to laugh.
"What a clumsy oaf."
"Can't even walk."
"On the floor where she belongs."
"She should just crawl everywhere. If walking's too hard for her."
"I bet she's used to being on her knees."
Taylor gathered up her books and forced herself back up onto her feet. She had taped a bag of frozen peas to her bad foot the night before, but it still hurt like hell. At school, she had done everything she could to hide her limp, but her bullies seemed to stalk her like a pack of hyenas.
She didn't use her powers in school. For the most part that was easy. Iron and steel would out her as a cape, and tin would just make everything louder and brighter. But zinc ... zinc was a hard power to say no to. It would be so easy to pop a penny in her mouth and make Madison so afraid she never bothered her again, make Sophia so angry she crossed the line and got expelled ... make Emma finally feel guilty for everything she had done.
But she knew that if she started, she would never stop. From there it would be easy to make people happy to be around her, to make them laugh when she stumbled through the punchline of a bad joke and to surround herself with friends. Then some day she might find a boy she liked, and make his heart race with zinc when her own appearance wouldn't cut it.
She could become the queen of Winslow High instead of ... instead of what she was. She could have everything she wanted, until the PRT caught on that there was a Master bending minors to her will like a junior Heartbreaker. Besides, all the fake friends in the world wouldn't be enough.
No, she drew her line in the sand, and she would not cross it.
Chemistry was her next class. She arrived early, wanting to spend as little time in the hallway as possible, and opened up her textbook. Anyone who saw her would assume she was studying, and in a way she was. Just not for class.
She stared at the periodic table, hoping that some pattern would reveal itself. She had discovered aluminum, chromium, iron, copper, zinc, and tin so far, by isolating the essential minerals a multivitamin pill contained and then by random, painful experimentation. Whenever she tried to burn something that her power rejected, she ended up with a splitting headache all day long that made her so miserable she wanted to die, but she was determined to try a new metal once a week.
Then, off the periodic table, there were alloys she could burn. Bronze did nothing she could notice, but steel did the opposite of iron, and turned out to be far more useful. Did every burnable element have an opposite? Bronze was made out of copper, tin, and zinc, but it did the same thing as copper, which also did nothing.
The more she thought about it, the more she liked the idea. Okay, she thought. This Saturday, I'll try an alloy.
Chromium did nothing, so finding an alloy that did the opposite of that (more nothing), didn't appeal to her. Aluminum did next to nothing, and only deleted the metals in her stomach, so that wasn't something she wanted to explore. Zinc and tin seemed like her best options.
She jotted a few notes in her notebook as students began filing in, and class began. She tried to pay attention to the lecture on covalent bonds, but she couldn't help thinking that this was a waste of time. She'd be better off experimenting more with her powers, practicing her control and figuring out what copper, chromium, and bronze did.
But ... what she really wanted, more than anything, was to go out again like she had last night, and fly.
WWW
That night, Taylor flew.
Iron nails and steel screws filled her stomach, and the city was filled with blue lines sending her through the air. Had the city always had so much metal? She had always seen Brockton Bay as concrete and asphalt, but underneath it all was a skeleton of steel.
Her foot still hurt when she walked no matter how well she wrapped it in medical tape. Fortunately, she barely touched the ground. Playing "The Floor is Lava" was much more fun with super powers.
And that was the nature of her game. Pushing herself away from metal made it impossible to hover in place like Glory Girl or Aegis could, and the closest she could manage had her bouncing up and down as though from an invisible bungee cord.
Turns weren't as dangerous now as they were the night before, and she didn't cling to the roads like the cars below her. Her stomach lurched with each jump and her heart raced each time she looked down, and she was as terrified as she was free.
She jumped from anchor to anchor, using iron to nudge her trajectory whenever she veered off course. She left behind the warehouses and factories of the docks and came upon the apartment complexes and office buildings of the downtown area that rose over two hundred feet into the air.
Taylor picked the tallest one out of the skyline and began to ascend. She pushed against the base of the tower and pulled herself toward the upper floors. Pushing and pulling at the same time made her feel like she was being simultaneously stretched and crushed, but the horizontal vectors of her force cancelled each other out shooting her straight up like a rocket. She crested the top and extinguished steel, pulling herself onto the roof.
She tossed a few coins below her to push against to break her fall, but even then she stumbled and her bad foot flared in pain. She collapsed, rolled over, and looked up at the stars until her breathing slowed.
This, she thought, this is why flight is everyone's favorite super power. She felt dizzy, sweaty, exhausted, and ready for more.
But for a moment she lay there, burning tin despite the pain in her foot. With tin, millions of stars burst into light, piercing the clouds and smog in the sky. The air was colder up here, the wind unhindered, and she shivered as it bit into her sweat-damp skin.
She burned bronze too, even though it didn't do anything. She had cut off part of a bronze wool pad used for scrubbing dishes and swallowed part of it, just in case she stumbled across its power. She'd go back and forth between bronze, copper, and chromium until something came up. Until then, her other four powers were good enough for anyone.
Goggles, she thought. I should get some goggles to wear. Maybe ski goggles that doubled as sunglasses, so she could burn tin during the daytime. There wasn't much of a demand for skiing equipment in a coastal town like Brockton Bay, but there were shops that sold everything here. And if that didn't work, she could try to order something online.
She got up and limped over to the side of the roof to look over the edge. A blanket of mist covered the city like it had the night before, and lights shone through that mist with a spectral glow. The Protectorate Headquarters stood out in the middle of the bay as though floating in the water, and the ocean held the reflection of the moon.
Beautiful. She had never thought of Brockton Bay as beautiful before. She had lived here her whole life, and the older she got the more ugliness she found. But ... but she had never looked at the city from so high up. From up here, it was easy to see why tourists flocked here every summer. From up here, what she had to go through to get this far was almost worth it.
Almost.
She reached into her sleeve and ran her fingers across one of the many scars she carried on her arms. She closed her eyes, and began to pick at the memory like a scab, even knowing that the more she did that the longer it would take to heal.
To this day, she didn't know if the three of them meant for things to go as far as they did. But if they didn't, they had shown no remorse through the ensuing months.
A locker was like a coffin that she had been forced into before she had even died. And it wasn't just the tight, crushing darkness that they had trapped her in, but the garbage they had filled it with before her. She pushed and thrashed and screamed and cried, but the only answer had been the piercing cuts. Nails, red with rust and then with blood, had been thrown into the mix, and the more they stabbed into her the more she panicked, and the more they panicked the more they stabbed. By the time someone had let her out, her arms were torn and raked, and to this day she looked like she had suffered an enthusiastic yet incompetent suicide attempt.
She clenched her fists and forced her mind back into the present. The night was late and the scenery ruined, and it was time to go home.
But as she turned to leave, she felt a pulse. Like a heartbeat, but out of sync with her own. Not knowing where it came from, she flared tin, but it stayed quiet as the rest of the world grew louder. Frowning, she extinguished tin entirely, but the pulse remained. She couldn't hear her own heartbeat anymore, but she could still hear that.
Not sure what else to do, she flared bronze.
Ba-dum ...
Ba-dum ...
She extinguished bronze, and the pulse went silent.
So that's what you do, she thought. A faint and distant drumbeat.
But what did it mean?
She burned steel, pushed herself off the roof, and began to follow it.
WWW
The pulse had no direction, but at times it grew louder and at others it stopped entirely. As Taylor learned to focus on the beat, she could hold onto it even as she flew. There were even other pulses, nearly drowned out by the first, but she followed the loudest until she found out what it was.
Shadow Stalker.
In a black cloak at night, she would have been nearly invisible to anyone else, but while Taylor burned tin she might as well have been standing in broad daylight. She peered down over the edges of buildings, and jumped from rooftop to rooftop in translucent glides.
Taylor hesitated. She didn't know the hero very well, but she didn't know any other capes at all, and the night before Shadow Stalker had been willing to ... tolerate her presence. She jumped from building to building until she reached the one where Shadow Stalker stood. Taylor dropped a few coins beneath her when she landed, and even on one foot she managed to not sound like a rampaging elephant.
Shadow Stalker spun around, pointed her crossbow at her, and fired.
Taylor flared steel, pushing against the tranquilizer bolt and making it miss her by less than a foot. "Don't shoot!" Taylor said.
Shadow Stalker lowered her crossbow slowly, as though she would be perfectly happy shooting her again. "It's you. Would you like to join the Wards?"
What? "No."
She shrugged. "Well, I asked. So what do you want?"
There was no apology in her voice for nearly tranquilizing her, but Taylor doubted that she would give one if pushed. "I never thanked you for saving my life last night."
She shrugged again. "I saw a shot, and I took it. You're just lucky it happened before Hookwolf tore you open instead of after."
Right. This was Shadow Stalker Taylor was talking to. From their previous conversation Shadow Stalker had worked alone until that had stopped being an option for her. She had preferred the old days, being a vigilante. She hadn't become a hero to make friends.
"Did they bring him in alright?"
"Yeah, yeah. Old Wolfie is alive and well." She chuckled, a sound that clashed with the stern woman's face she wore as a mask. "Well, alive at least."
"Is the PRT after me?"
"Not yet. If they force you in, they know you'll be a pain in the neck until you turn eighteen, so Armsmaster told me to invite you next time I saw you. And I did, and I'm done. How long were you looking for me?"
"I wasn't," she admitted. "I just saw you, and I came over."
Taylor couldn't see Shadow Stalker roll her eyes, but the rest of her body suggested that. "Right. You just happened to see me wearing all black in the dead of night while you were minding your own business.."
"I can see in the dark." Should she have told her that? The PRT wasn't after her yet, but ... no, night vision wasn't a major power, and if she wanted to test her theory on bronze, she'd need Shadow Stalker's help. "And ... something else. Could you show me your power?"
Taylor felt odd asking that. Her social interactions for most of the past year had been limited to her dad and a few teachers, and even though she and Shadow Stalker were both capes, Taylor hadn't been out enough to feel like she belonged. She wanted to burn zinc to put Shadow Stalker in a friendlier mood, but between whatever Master/Stranger training the Wards had and being on the same team as Gallant, that could backfire.
But Shadow Stalker didn't seem to mind. "Yeah, sure." Her form darkened and became translucent, as though it wasn't really there. Taylor had seen the same thing the night before, but if she had just wanted another look, she could have found a video online. Here in person, she could listen.
Ba-dum.
Ba-dum.
The pulse was clearer now, unmistakably so. "Alright, you can stop."
Shadow Stalker shifted back. "What was that about?"
"I'm still trying to figure out what I can do," Taylor explained. "I think I can sense powers."
"What?"
Taylor shrugged, or at least tried to. It came out as more of a hunch. "I could hear something when you were using yours. That's how I found you."
Shadow Stalker turned to her, dropping the posture of casual indifference. "What's your range?"
"Not sure yet. A few hundred feet, maybe a thousand." That was about how far away Shadow Stalker had been when Taylor first noticed, and the range might vary for different powers.
Shadow Stalker stared at her until Taylor grew uncomfortable. Not that that said very much. Taylor didn't do comfortable any more than Shadow Stalker did nice.
"Do you want to go hunting with me?"
"W-what?"
"There's a villain in the docks that's been causing me trouble, and the hardest part is finding him. So again, do you want to go hunting?"
Wow. That was ... what could she even say to that? The last time someone asked to hang out with her that wasn't part of some cruel prank, Taylor had been in summer camp. And now an actual superhero wanted Taylor to fight crime with her. There was really only one thing she could say to an offer like that.
"I won't be any good in a fight. I'm still injured from yesterday."
"Like that matters. I'll be the hunter. I just need you to be the hound. Are you in or are you out?"
Hound? Hardly the most flattering way Shadow Stalker could have phrased that. But Taylor still couldn't turn her down.
"I'm in."
WWW
Brockton Bay had an incredible number of capes for its size, but that didn't mean that heroes and villains were crawling out of the woodwork. There were about fifty in total, and they didn't have their powers on nonstop.
Still, Taylor wasn't going to be the one to bring that up. She'd keep going until she ran out of metals to burn or Shadow Stalker decided to go home.
The hunt turned out to be surprisingly tedious for cape work. Shadow Stalker could move much faster than a normal human, but she couldn't fly so Taylor could only go ahead a few buildings before she had to stop and wait for Shadow Stalker to catch up. And landing was still not something she was good at.
BA-DUM.
Taylor stopped and stared into the night. That pulse ... it was far louder than Shadow Stalker's had been, even when Shadow Stalker was right in front of her. But while Shadow Stalker's pulse had a steady beat, this one was sudden and then silent.
"What?" Shadow Stalker said.
"I heard something."
"Which way?"
The truth was Taylor had no idea. She was playing Hot and Cold with a power she had just discovered a few minutes ago, but Shadow Stalker wouldn't appreciate excuses.
Then she heard an explosion. It was distant and for all she knew it could have been a gunshot, a firecracker, or just a car backfiring, but she trusted tin more than she trusted bronze. "This way," she said, and she pushed herself off the roof and toward the bay.
Taylor didn't know what she would do when she got there, but she knew she would find trouble. That was inevitable in the docks this late at night, and ... and Shadow Stalker would know what to do after that.
She hopped over buildings in her not-quite-flying way, and soon arrived at the scene. She saw a group of teenagers and twenty-somethings harassing a middle aged man. They seemed to be only verbally abusing him at the moment, though that could have been their way of revving up to something physical.
"ABB thugs?" Shadow Stalker said, appearing beside her. She sounded disappointed.
Taylor recognized the gang colors as soon as she started looking for them. She knew everything there was to know about capes and local crime syndicates that could be learned online, which was not that much at all. "Hoping for someone else?"
"No, no, this is fine. Crooks are crooks." She didn't sound pleased, but her abiding hunger shone through.
Taylor nodded. "What's the plan? If you start sniping them, I could disarm anyone who tries to pull out a gun. Or would that turn into a hostage situation?" And how quickly could Shadow Stalker shoot? She had two crossbows, but Taylor didn't know how long it took to reload.
Shadow Stalker gave her a look that she couldn't read, but it felt condescending. "Are you strategizing?"
"Yes."
She shook her head. "Listen vigilante, this job doesn't come with a whole lot of perks, but you're free, and you're strong. Those are the two most important things in the world, and they're all yours. So stop overthinking everything and have fun."
"Fun?"
"Fun," she repeated. On the street below them, Taylor heard a sickening crack as knuckles met bone so loud it sounded like it was right next to her. Shadow Stalker whispered something so softly Taylor wouldn't have picked it up without tin. "Finally."
She jumped off the roof and became solid in time to drop the man she landed on. Her cape whirled and she shifted from solid to shadow to solid again in the blink of an eye, her actions too swift for Taylor to keep track of, and the people around her screamed in surprise, in anger, and then in pain.
And in a matter of seconds, the fight was over. The ABB thugs who could run ran, leaving behind those who couldn't. Taylor stared down at the aftermath from above. Would it have made more sense if she had been closer to the action? Or just more chaotic?
Shadow Stalker moved to the old man, who was rising to his feet. Taylor didn't know if Shadow Stalker needed to take his statement or anything official like that, but—
A man appeared behind the hero, a demon mask on his face and a knife in his hand.
"Look out!" Taylor shouted.
Without even looking around, Shadow Stalker shifted into her shadow state, and the knife passed through her.
Then Oni Lee looked up at Taylor, standing on the roof. And suddenly, he was there right next to her.
Crap.
His knife glinted in the night, and Taylor burned steel, pushing it out of his hand. She stumbled backwards and bumped right into another man who wrapped his arms around her neck.
What? Where did he come from? But she didn't have time to think, because Oni Lee was coming at her with his fist raised. He was wearing metal, a bandolier full of knives that she pushed against, knocking him backward and sending her second attacker off balance. The building she stood on was full of metal too, and she pushed on that, shooting her upward and freeing herself.
Then the world exploded. It was like a canon went off in her head, echoing through her skull, vibrating through every bone in her body. It was so loud it deafened her, blinded her, numbed her—until she landed. Face first on the roof. The wind knocked out of her. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Oni Lee.
Move!
She stared dumbly at him as he pulled another knife out of his bandolier. It made a blue line of light, going straight to her chest.
Run!
He flipped the knife in the air, catching it by the tip between his finger and his thumb. It was ... dizzying to watch.
Fight!
He threw the knife, and it spun, round and round, like a ... like a ...
She burned steel, and closed her eyes.
WWW
"Hey. You alive? 'Cause if you're not, there's a whole mess of paperwork that I don't want to do."
Ugh. Taylor found herself lying on concrete, and she pushed herself to her knees. "What ... what happened?" she asked. "How long was I out?" Her scarf was still in place over her face, though it felt damp. Bloody nose? She tasted blood, at least.
Shadow Stalker stood over her, her arms folded. "Do I look like a pocket watch? Like, a minute."
Taylor jumped to her feet despite her bad ankle. "What happened to Oni Lee?"
"You."
Taylor stared at her. "What?"
Shadow Stalker gestured toward a body lying on the roof with him. Taylor recognized the demon mask and ninja outfit ... and the knife sticking out of his eye.
"Of course, then you passed out like a little bitch, but still," Shadow Stalker said. "Not bad for your second night out."
Taylor stared at the body. She had killed someone. She had killed someone. She had ... she had ...
"Hey!" Shadow Stalker said, grabbing her by the arm. "Earth to ... you! If you're going to have a breakdown, put it off for, like, two minutes, okay?" She dragged her to the edge of the roof, and pointed at something on the street below. Burning tin, Taylor saw another body, just as dead and far more mangled than Oni Lee's.
"See that?" Shadow Stalker continued. "That's the last thing the psycho ninja did before he bit it. Tossed a grenade at me before he teleported. Even in my shadow state, that hurts. Sent me all over the place, took forever to pull myself back together. But that civilian?" She shook her head. "They're going to have a lot of trouble identifying the body."
Taylor swallowed. If ... if she hadn't been here, would he have lived? Would the ABB just have roughed him up a bit and let him go? Or would they still have killed him? "So you're saying Oni Lee deserved it." That ... should have made things easier. And from what she remembered reading on the internet, Oni Lee was a mass murderer, and that man was far from the first person he had killed.
He was just his last.
"Deserved it?" She barked a laugh. "Deserve's got nothing to do with it. Maybe no one 'deserves' to die. Maybe everyone does. How the hell should I know? All I know is that everyone's fighting to survive, vigilante, everyone. We won, they lost. That's just the way things work." Her voice softened into something almost gentle, and she continued. "You survived the worst day of your life. Maybe you were strong, maybe you were smart, maybe you were just lucky. Hell, for all I know, maybe you were just too stubborn to die. But the only thing that matters is that you're still standing." She turned to Oni Lee's dead body. "And he isn't."
Taylor realized that the explosion she had heard must have been the grenade, magnified by her own enhanced hearing. It was the sort of thing that could have gotten her killed. Almost had. But I'm still alive. It wasn't a happy thought, just a hollow shell of a feeling, but it was solid, in a way. Something to hang on to. "Okay. So. What do we do about ..." She gestured toward the body.
"Oh, that's easy." Shadow Stalker grabbed Oni Lee, and when she went intangible, the body went with her. She half dragged, half floated it over to the edge of the roof, dropped down to the alley below, and shoved him through the asphalt. Taylor dropped a coin down to join her. "Rest in peace, you son of a bitch," Shadow Stalker said.
She couldn't see even a trace of the villain. Had the body gone all the way down to the sewers, or was it just phased into the ground? "Are you sure that's the right thing to do?"
She shrugged. "It's the smart thing, at least. It doesn't involve Lung coming after us for killing his right hand asshole, or the PRT trying to criminalize self defense to get another super powered indentured servant. Maybe a few years down the road some construction worker will come across some dried up piece of him, but ..." She shrugged again.
"You've done this before."
She turned to her, her posture aggressive. "So what if I have? You can either be the one putting people in the ground, or the one in it. You don't get to choose not to fight. You only get to choose whether or not to win. So. Do you want to die, or do you want to win?"
"No, I want to win." For once in her life, she wanted to win. For so long she felt like she had been slowly dying, day by day, hour by hour, but ...
"Say it like you mean it," she hissed.
"I want to win!"
Her voice rang out through the night like shattering glass. She regretted it immediately, worried that someone might look out their window and find her literally standing in a murder scene.
But Shadow Stalker didn't seem to mind, and anyone willing to ignore a grenade going off knew to keep their heads down. She stepped forward and Taylor could see her dark eyes through the holes in her mask. "And don't you forget it." She spun on her heel, her cape flourishing behind her. "I'll see you around, Survivor."
WWW
A/n I've kind of been going through my old stories and finding the writer's block that stopped me from finishing them before just wasn't around anymore. So here's another story from yesteryear.
As a disclaimer, I have no experience having a twisted, sprained, or broken ankle, and I have no idea how debilitating any of those injuries are in real life. Fortunately, neither does Taylor, so she may have thought her ankle was sprained when it was just twisted or vice versa. Or she's been burning small amounts of pewter without noticing. Whatever sort of injury gives you a bad limp for at least a day, that's the sort of injury she has.
My thanks to my s, Exiled Immortal, Prime 2.0, Sphinxes, Kelsey Bull, Hubris Prime, Apofatix, Janember, Yotam Bonneh, Svistka, and Lady Charon, and to all my readers and everyone who left comments and reviews.