CHAPTER SEVEN - The Satos

Asami had migrated to the parking lot even closer to the dorm, so she was easy to find when Korra and Mako arrived.

"What are you doing here?" Korra hissed, ducking behind the same car she was hiding behind. "What if they see you? I thought you were over at the other side of the quad!"

"I needed to get a closer look," she said, barely paying attention to them. "But they just left, literally a minute before you guys showed up. No car, they just traipsed off campus that way, probably the east exit by the Arts building."

Sure enough when Korra looked up at Asami's room, as she was fairly accustomed to doing after three days of stalking her, it was empty.

"Huh, so now there's no one here," Mako whispered in Korra's ear. "How convenient and not at all trap-like."

Korra stomped hard on his foot. She'd already told him a thousand times in the car that if Asami wanted to ambush them, for whatever dumbass reasons Mako was making up in his head, she'd had three days worth of opportunities to do so already.

"Did they have anything with them?"

"I don't think they took anything. At least, it didn't seem like they were holding anything when they left." She looked at them, worried. "What were they doing in my dorm?"

Mako and Korra shared a look. Neither one of them wanted to tell her about Zaheer coming to the house, or the suspicious phone call he made that may or may not have prompted this burglary.

"Only one way to find out," Korra said, straightening and heading for the building. "Come on."

She led the way up to the side door, where Asami used her key fob to beep them in. At this, Korra glanced at Mako with concern. She was worried for no reason, though, as he had no problem following them inside and up the stairs.

"She didn't have to invite you in," Korra observed. "I thought I was going to have to leave you outside."

"What, and tie me up to a bike rack like a puppy?" Mako shrugged. "I've never been in a dorm before. It's a temporary housing situation, maybe it doesn't count as a home? It explains how Ghazan and Ming-Hua got in, anyway."

They followed Asami to the second floor and waited as she unlocked the door. She was first to go in, and she watched as Mako strode in effortlessly.

"So that thing about vampires not being able to enter homes unless invited...that's true?"

Korra nodded. "Yeah, he can't like, break into someone's house or anything. He can get into abandoned houses though, because no one lives in them. He can bust into apartment buildings, but not specific apartments, that kind of thing. Oh, and remember that time we went to the camping grounds and you found out you can enter people's tents and RVs and - ?"

"We were experimenting," Mako said quickly, nudging her with his elbow to make her shut up. "You know, testing out of curiosity. We weren't trying to steal anything or hurt anyone."

"We weren't being creepy," she echoed, realizing too late how weird their random trespassing sounded. "Like, one time we spent half an hour watching Bolin stick his arm through things and he'd ask us if we could see it from the other side. And once me and Mako spent the week before a full moon traveling to different time zones to see if it was possible to put off one of my full moon transformations.

Asami just blinked at them.

"...We just do stuff like that, sometimes," Korra said weakly.

Asami looked like she had dozens of questions on the tip of her tongue, but eventually she decided on just the one.

"What about the thing where vampires don't show up in mirrors?"

Mako stepped in front of a full length mirror next to the door and waved. There was no reflection to wave back.

"Nope."

She pursed her lips, considering her first supernatural scientific oddity.

"So the security cameras in the hallways…?"

"They got nothing. Sorry," Korra said.

It was as if Asami had forgotten the entire reason they were all there. She was utterly preoccupied with Mako and the mirror. She walked behind him and checked the reflection - Mako's reflection wasn't there to block hers. Tentatively, she reached out and placed a hand on his shoulder. He flinched, but the mirror showed her fingers curled over nothing. Her own befuddled expression stared back at her incredulously.

"How is this possible? How the hell...you absorb and reflect light. I can see you. I can see your colors. I can…" She blushed, removing her hand from his arm, and looked back and forth between him and the mirror. "The specular reflection, I mean, the angle of light isn't even...this doesn't make sense."

"Yeah, well, welcome to our world," he said dryly.

"I read it had something to do with the soul," Korra suggested. "Like, vampires have no soul, so nothing is reflected back in mirrors."

"And I try not to be too offended by it every time she says that," Mako said dryly.

"Mirrors don't reflect souls, though," Asami said, still gaping. "They reflect light, send images to our eyes, they - fuck, this is really stressful. This is basic physics and it isn't...it's not…"

Korra gently moved her away from the mirror.

"Okay, look. I don't think we need to freak out about photons or whatever right now."

This girl was hardcore physics. An engineering science major. She had schematics for unidentifiable machines and parts plastered all over her walls. Her whiteboard with mathematical equations and sketches took over nearly half the room. The desk was overrun with engineering books and scattered papers and science journals. She was someone that dedicated her whole life to studying and innovating physical, tangible things that followed laws set by nature. The existence of vampires, werewolves, and ghosts were likely strange and pretty frightening to her mind, but light having the audacity to not reflect properly? Deplorable!

"Does anything look like it's missing?" Mako asked, inching away from Asami and the mirror to brood over a stack of her engineering awards. He kept his hands respectfully at his sides, which Korra had to appreciate.

"Not really, no," Asami admitted absently. She took out her phone and aimed the camera at him. Nothing but her cluttered room appeared on screen. "What the fuck - I mean, sorry, but you cast a goddamn shadow! How do you not have a reflection?!"

"What am I, a fucking lab experiment?"

"Mako!" Korra scolded, although she couldn't really blame him. Mako absolutely hated what he was, he didn't need someone shining a light into his eyes. It was embarrassing, intrusive, and disrespectful. Still, he could have been a little bit less harsh.

Asami looked surprised. "Sorry, I didn't realize - "

"Of course you didn't."

"She's sorry, Mako, relax." Korra put a hand on his arm to calm him.

"I am relaxed!" he said defiantly. "She needs to relax!"

"I'm just curious," Asami reasoned. "Like how you just said - you've experimented yourselves."

Mako bristled. "Except we weren't making other people feel like freakshows!"

To her credit, she didn't seem afraid of him. But it was Korra's experience that bravery and curiosity needed a little balance with empathy and humility.

"He's not wrong, Asami," Korra said quietly. "It doesn't feel good, especially coming from people like you who don't have to deal with it themselves."

Now Asami looked adequately ashamed. She swallowed.

"I didn't think about it like that. That was stupid of me and I'm really sorry, Mako. I didn't mean to make you feel...bad."

He just huffed and busied himself looking around the room. Asami sighed and looked at Korra.

"I'm an asshole."

"Nah." Korra made a face. "Or, well, maybe just this one time. For like a second."

"Sorry."

"I know. Hey, undead burglars in your dorm, remember? Does it look like they did anything?"

"Right. Yeah," Asami said, still flustered. She sheepishly straightened a stack of books. "Um, I know the room is a little disgusting, but it always looks like this. I wasn't planning on staying long, so I never really got too invested in tidying it up."

It wasn't a dirty mess, so disgusting wasn't quite the word for it. The clothes piled on her bed all smelled freshly laundered, there weren't any open containers of food or crumbs anywhere, and it wasn't like the trash can was overflowing with garbage and flies. In fact, everything seemed ironically clean, just piled up haphazardly so they were out of her way.

"It's not a disgusting. It's just...entropy! The natural state of things, " Korra said. Asami looked at her in surprise. "Hey, don't look so shocked. I didn't just dissect frogs in 8th grade, y'know."

She grinned at that as she ruffled around folders and papers on her desk.

"I can't imagine what they were looking for. It's literally just my school projects in here."

Korra glanced at the whiteboard again. "Anything interesting?"

Asami shrugged. "I mean, it's very interesting to me. I have a few things in the works but currently my biggest project is an extremely powerful rotary engine. I've calculated a way to make it more compact than anything on the on the market. It's really exciting, but not of particular interest to anyone outside of the department. It's all theoretical, I haven't gotten a chance to work on application."

"Wait a minute," Mako said suddenly, pointing to a framed photo he'd found on her desk. "Is your name Asami Sato?"

Korra looked at the photo as well. A woman that looked astonishingly like an older Asami beamed at the camera, next to a familiar-looking classic cherry red 1975 Satomobile Stallion. Her arm was curled gently around a giggling toddler, who was plopped on the hood of the car with a melting ice cream cone clutched in her tiny fists. The woman didn't seem to care in the slightest that her daughter was dripping chocolate all over her flashy sports car. They looked so happy.

For a moment, as she looked at the photo, Asami looked happy as well.

"Yes."

"Wait, Sato? As in, Satomobile?" Korra asked in awe. "That Sato?"

Behind the car in the picture was a large building, with the words "SATOMOBILE WORLDWIDE, INC." It clicked for her then - Satomobile Worldwide was now just a subsidiary of the Sato-owned parent company Future Industries, which was a worldwide business juggernaut. It had started with a guy that invented some fancy mass-produced engine, and blew up over the next twenty-five years into one of the largest multinational corporations in the world.

Essentially, Korra was staring at the richest person she'd ever met in her life.

"Future Industries and Satomobile Worldwide belong to my father, yes," she said wistfully, still gazing at the photo. "He gave that car to my mother in '97 after he restored it himself. She died about five years later and left it to me. My dad left it to rot in a garage until I was old enough to restore it again myself, and I've been maintaining it ever since. It's still a really great car."

Korra smiled softly. "I'm sorry about your mother. But if it makes you feel any better, literally everything in that photo is gorgeous. You, your mom, and the car."

"Thank you."

"If you're a Sato, you must have money," Mako said skeptically. "Why are you looking to rent a room for cheap?"

"Rude," Korra warned him.

Mako winced. "Okay, sorry about your mom. Not trying to be rude. I just thought it was weird. Future Industries is famous all over the world. It's not like it's just Satomobiles anymore, they've branched out into technology, aviation, rocketry, even crazy military stuff. You must be loaded."

It was pretty strange that the heiress to Future Industries was living in a tiny dorm room, even if it was a private room, on campus. Even stranger that she was now looking for a cheaper off-campus alternative.

"I am loaded. Kind of." Asami's eyes averted to the floor, as if she were a little embarrassed. "When my mother died, my father kind of fell apart. I stood it for as long as I could, but in the end I had to back away. We don't talk, I haven't spoken to him for three years."

Mako looked about to say something stupid, but before Korra could stop him, it flew out of his mouth.

"What'd he do?"

"Rude, Mako!" Korra fumed. "That's none of our business."

"I'd rather not talk about it," Asami replied, seemingly unoffended. "Anyway, my mother left me a fortune in a trust fund, but I can't touch it until I'm thirty. I think she wanted me to learn the value of hard work. You know, making myself into something instead of just being given everything. But I'm allowed to access a limited amount for my education and expenses. I've splurged a little more than I probably should have on a few of my projects, so the funds are running a little lower than I'd like. This private dorm is really expensive, but I needed the space and didn't want to disturb a roommate. So I'm looking for other options so I can stretch my education cash to the end of the school year."

It made sense. Asami Sato carried herself with an air of confidence, a hint of arrogance, with perfect hair, and perfectly done lipstick. The clothes she wore were respectable, but not extravagant. Her room wasn't neat, but clean. Everything about her indicated someone with a privileged upbringing, but without all the bells and whistles.

Mako rolled his eyes and continued looking around the dorm, and Asami silently followed suit. As they searched, Korra came upon an old photo album. The cover had another photo of Asami and her mother. They were older, and judging by Asami's age, it must have been shortly before Mrs. Sato died.

"You look just like her," Korra commented.

"Thanks," Asami smiled. "That's a compliment."

"Sure is."

She was pleased to detect just the slightest blush in her cheeks.

"You can look through it if you want. It's just photos of me as a kid," Asami said, busying herself with sorting through a box of old notebooks.

Korra helped herself, flipping through the album. Infant Asami and her mother in the nursery, presumably just after she got home from the hospital. Mrs. Sato feeding baby Asami in a high chair. Asami's first steps. Asami and her mother in the school hallway on her first day of preschool. Asami and her mother at her kindergarten graduation.

"Why isn't your dad in any of these?" she wondered out loud.

"Oh, he was always busy at the company," Asami replied dismissively. "I mean, he was there for all my important stuff. He was a good dad, but he had a company to run."

"But he's not here at all," she observed, looking at a page of photos that must have been the same day as the one framed on her desk. Asami was wearing the same red dress, skipping through the Satomobile Worldwide parking lot with her mother in tow. It was Mr. Sato's office building. Why wouldn't he be in these photos?

"Well, he did take most of those. Someone had to be behind the camera, right? This was pre-selfie stick era. You know, the dark ages." She laughed, as if remembering something fondly. "He was super-obsessed with paintings though. He much preferred getting family portraits painted, rather than photographed. Every year on my birthday up until my mother died, I had to pose with my parents for fucking hours just to get painted by a professional. All those paintings are still hung around the estate. It's almost creepy!"

Korra said nothing, and glared at Mako so he would do the same. He bit his lip and looked away, because they knew they were both thinking the same thing.

A vampire wouldn't show up in photos. A vampire would avoid cameras at all costs. And maybe, a vampire would get their daughter all mixed up in vampire business and have something to do with other vampires searching their college dorm.

Of course, it also didn't necessarily mean anything. Maybe Mr. Sato really was just a painting enthusiast. People had much stranger hobbies and preferences, especially if they were stupidly rich. Mako had gotten her werewolf cage at a sex shop, after all. To each their own.

Still, though, this was not the time to bring it up to Asami. It clearly hadn't occurred to her at all, probably because she hadn't lived the past three years of her life as a monster and despite all her genius, it wasn't her instinct to think random stuff like that.

"Hey, what happened here?" Korra asked suddenly, holding up the album. It looked like a photo was missing. There was even a rectangular outline from where it had been pasted.

Asami frowned.

"Huh. It must have fallen out." She came over and looked around on the floor. "That album is pretty old, some of the adhesive has been coming loose. I've had to reinforce some of those with tape. I meant to scan them all so I have digital copies, but never got around to doing it."

She checked the bed, moving around her clothes to see if the missing photo was underneath.

"What was the picture of?" Mako asked, taking the album from me and checking out the page. The photo before it was of Asami and her mother in the front lobby of Satomobile Worldwide. The one directly after it was Asami perched on an executive's desk with a pen in her mouth, probably in one of the offices.

"It was in my dad's office," she said, straightening and looking somewhat worried. She took the album and traced the faint outline of the missing photo. "Obviously I was too young to actually remember that day, but I know we had tons of pictures in the offices and hallways of the building. It was the day my dad opened the Satomobile Worldwide Headquarters, so it was a huge deal, but I can't remember exactly which one this was."

"Do you think...maybe that's what Ghazan and Ming-Hua came for?" Korra mused.

"I can't see why that would be," Asami said, her brows knitted in concentration trying to recall what the picture was. "Like I said, all these photos were just to commemorate the Satomobile HQ. They were all kind of the same. Just me and my mom sitting and posing in different spots, I think."

Mako looked around at the rest of the room. "Well, nothing else seems to be missing. There is the possibility, though, that they could have taken photos with their phones of something. If they wanted one of these formulas or were interested in you schematics, they didn't have to take them. All they needed was to snap a pic and sneak away."

"My engine?" Asami asked, putting the album down. "I mean, I'll admit it's cool, but what do vampires need with an engine?"

Korra shrugged. "Vampires are weird."

"Vampires are ambitious," Mako said, looking concerned. "I don't even want to know what some of the bigger assholes would do with advanced technology."

"That's a little generous," Asami said humbly. "It's never been done before, sure, but it's still just a school project."

They fell silent, trying to think. Nothing was physically removed from the room, other than maybe some random photo from an old album. It was possible they'd taken something else, but they couldn't figure out what. Asami had also said they'd had plenty of time to root through her things, so whatever it was, they weren't rushed and they likely already got what they came for. That meant they probably wouldn't return. Still…

"Are you comfortable sleeping here tonight?" Korra asked. Mako's eyes widened and he shook his head violently behind Asami.

"I mean, I'm sure they're not coming back. They've got no reason to anymore," Asami said, clearly not at all sure.

"That would be my guess," she said. "But I know this is a little unsettling. And while I know that it's probably even more unsettling that Mako, Bolin, and I locked you in a cage and then stalked you for three days straight..."

"Well, I think I'd put those two things pretty close together."

"...our house is safe." Korra scowled at Mako, who was still vigorously waving his hands at her, trying to get her to shut up. "The only vampire that can enter it is Mako, and all things considered, he's completely harmless."

"I am not." He scowled.

"Harmless to you, I mean," Korra amended, to preserve his fragile vampire masculinity. "Just like me and Bo. So, if you're not still too freaked out by the cage thing, and the stalking thing, and the existence of mythical creatures existing beyond the teachings of science thing, I mean, you're still welcome to rent the room."

Mako audibly let his head fall back and bang dramatically against the wall behind him. But he was just being a jerk. In the span of three days, this poor girl just had her entire world blown apart. She needed a safe place to stay, and frankly, they needed her money. There was also the fact that somehow, Asami was involved with vampires, whether she realized it or not. And she was definitely involved in the supernatural, with her ability to see ghosts. Korra felt this indescribable urge to protect her, for some reason. Maybe it was because they were Asami's first introduction to this seedy underworld, or maybe it was because she felt guilty for putting her in a cage. But either way, she felt responsible for this girl. It wouldn't have felt right to just cut things off now.

"You want me to live with you," she repeated.

"I'm just saying, it's safe with us," Korra said. As a joke, she added. "And if anyone tried to get you, the cage will protect you!"

Too late, she realized it wasn't funny. Mako shook his head in pity.

Dumbass.

Despite the frown, though, Asami seemed to be considering it.

"Thank you. I think," she said. "I'll sleep on it, okay?"

"Yeah, sure, no worries," Korra said, trying to put just the right amount of swagger in the statement. Mako rolled his eyes.

"Let's go," he said, ushering Korra out of the room.

"Wait!" Asami said. "I also wanted to thank you for coming. It was really nice of you to help me out."

"No problem-o," she grinned nervously, trying to wriggle out of Mako's grasp. "Think about it and shoot us a text-o."

No problem-o? Shoot us a text-o?

"Um, right." Asami smiled awkwardly.

Mako dragged her away as she tried to melt into the floor and cease to exist.

"Smooth, Kor. Real smooth."

"Fuck off, Mako."