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To truly understand something about Toph, you must know about her mother.
Lady Bei Fong was a fine lady, a doe-eyed beauty with grace and poise. She can throw sparkling dinner parties and enchant her guests with her witty chat and brilliant smile. Her family was so rich that they have a real last name instead of a serial code. A mark of the elite.
Toph, on the other hand, was not, and never was, the girl that her mother wanted her to be. She was rude and rough and rugged. She was a natural opposite of her elegant mother. Frilly dresses and lace was her sworn enemies, as was tea parties and cute dolls. She loved playing in the dirt, and was a gifted earthbender.
She even discovered how to "see" with earthbending. As astonishing as that is, it required her to go bare-foot, yet another thing that her mother disapproves of.
The Bei Fongs were ashamed of their daughter, for in their superficial lives, image was everything. A blind tomboy child simply wouldn't do.
But that doesn't matter now.
For the family fortune was lost after a horrible stock market fall. The family appeal for help went ignored as their self-adsorbed "friends" turned their backs. The family went from champagne and five-star hotels in the Serpent Island to cheap macaroni and dirty apartments in grimy Ba-Sing-Se West.
Toph's father, who married his way to riches, quickly left. No doubt he was hoping to woo some other wealthy woman to go back to his comfortable lifestyle.
Her mother became depressed, preferring to stay in bed and dream of happier times than to get up and face reality.
But not Toph, never Toph.
She was forced to grow up, relying only on her inner strength and sheer force of will to keep living. Toph quickly grasped the concept of "money", how people with this "money" are content and full and healthy, and how people without it are sad and hungry and sick.
She slowly figured out the basics of "cooking" and "cleaning", but still, more has to be done. Her mom was no help in her self-created hell.
Welfare and child support come through the mail, but it simply wasn't enough for her mother's pills and drinks. Toph knew that something had to be done. The money jar dwindled quicker than she can fill it, putting a frown on her face and a dreadful feeling in her heart.
As horrible as their living conditions are, there were upsides. Toph, for the first time in her young life, tasted freedom. Freedom to do what she wanted, freedom to say what she can.
She learned fighting from feeling the local gang wars. And Toph knew as soon as she felt it that it was made for her. Tough, fast, furious. So she practiced, smashing rocks into abandoned factory walls and whacking imaginary foe with the dusty bricks behind her rat-infested apartment.
She was good at it.
No.
She was great at it.
Toph was smart, and slowly, she simplified each of the movements to it's bare essentials. She worked hard, trying to focus on the effect rather than how flashy or threatening it looked. She imbedded the other bending styles from the immigrants in Area 17. The speed of the airbenders,the fluidness of the waterbenders, and the ferociousness of the firebenders.
But that doesn't give her the money that they needed desperately.
Before long, the landlord was threatening to throw them out, and that's too horrible to think about.
It seemed hopeless; Toph was almost ready to go work in one of the dark factories for minimum wages. The Dai Li left the slums of the West well alone, so no worries about age laws.
So Toph strained her sharp ears to look out for money-making opportunities, illegal or not. She picked up on everything, from the newest drug shipments to the gangs' leaders' new conquests.
Finally she eavesdropped on the one thing gave her hope and stopped her young legs from walking to the factory and pleading for a job.
Earth Rumbles.
She heard about the underground Earth Rumbles, where the winner gets ten thousand coppers for beating the living daylights out of his opponents in front of a violent crowd. It was dangerous, and the competition is tough, but Toph know that she can do it.
Maybe in another time, in another universe, she might have fought for the pure, exhilarating adrenalin rush of it. But not here, not now.
During the next Earth Rumble, held on the outskirts of Hell's Kitchen, Toph sneaked in.
And the rest, as they say, is history.