TDBB: Earth's Guardian #1.
The ground shrieked under her soles.
The sound was a high-frequency hum of industry, electricity, and the weight of too many people walking on unaware that the earth beneath them had become a corpse.
This was different from the shifting sands of the Si Wong Desert. There, grains slipped through her seismic sense like water through a sieve.
It was unlike the soft, breathing soil of the Foggy Swamp. This was heavy concrete, dead and artificial. An endless gray suffocation that felt like someone had wrapped the world in a wet wool blanket and set it on fire.
Toph Beifong kept her eyes closed. She had stopped needing them decades ago, and her blindness remained complete, even if her body felt light -- too light.
The arthritis that had settled into her joints back in the Foggy Swamp was gone. The heavy, dragging sensation of old age had been replaced by a springy, tight-wound tension in her muscles, the same tension she had known during the days of the Earth Rumble.
She was young again, or at least her meat-suit was. Her soul still felt like a jagged piece of granite that had tumbled in a river for ages.
She stood in an alleyway in Gotham, a city whose name was unknown to her but whose vibe was familiar. A place that made Ba Sing Se look like a well-ventilated garden.
Here, the buildings loomed over the streets like spectators at a funeral, their steel skeletons vibrating with the movement of elevators and the pulse of wires.
The last thing she remembered was the swamp, where the roots of the Banyan-grove tree had been loud that day, whispering about cycles and balance and things Toph tuned out in favor of catching giant catfish.
Then the ground had swallowed her, shifted and opened up like a tectonic invitation. There, deep in the pit, she had met them, ancient dusty voices that called themselves the Parliament of Stones.
They had pulled her without warning, without asking. That had been a mistake.
Toph made no claims to being the nicest person in existence, but she knew of manners. The so-called parliament had needed a lesson or two, on how to ask for what they wanted nicely.
The parliament was made of literal stone, and she had bent them, which made the lesson rougher than it might have been.
They had sent her out the same way she had been pulled before they could find the words, or the space, to elaborate on their request for a guardian.
But, she had arrived in a different location instead of the swamp.
With little idea of why she was here, and her sharp perception, Toph frowned at the city. The vibration through her bare soles was agonizing. Her body convulsed from the irritation.
She stepped forward.
Every time her heel hit the stone, she felt the echo of the city. Seismic sense was usually a clean map of solid rock and hollow caves and the rhythmic tap of footsteps. Here, it was garbage data, pipes filled with rushing waste and copper lines buzzing with enough power to fry a badger-mole. It was like trying to listen to a whisper in the middle of a thunderstorm.
She hated it.
"Hey, kid. You lost?" The voice smelled of cheap tobacco and even cheaper desperation.
Toph heard heartbeats, all erratic, thump-thump, thump-thump, the sound of men who lived on adrenaline and bad decisions. They fanned out ahead of her, close enough that she could feel the sweat on their palms, needing no sight of them.
Toph kept her attention on the rebar inside the concrete walls. It was thin, twisted, and tasted of rust, but it was metal, and if there was one thing Toph Beifong knew better than anyone in any world, it was how to talk to metal.
She felt the iron in the buildings around her, a grid and a cage, and this whole city was a cage for the earth. Underneath this alley, deep down, there was real soil, pushed down and compacted and crying out for air.
"I'm talking to you, brat. You got a purse? Or maybe those green clothes are worth something?" The lead thug stepped closer, heavy-set, his boots clicking on the ground with a sharp clack. He reached out a hand, his fingers twitching.
"You're in my way," Toph said. Her voice was younger than it should have been, but it still had that edge, the sound of a landslide waiting to happen.
The thug laughed, a jagged sound that grated against the silence of the alley. "Think you're tough ki--" He broke off.
Toph shifted her weight, a subtle turn of her hip that sent a pulse of energy through her lead foot. She spoke to the rebar. The steel mesh inside the ground groaned, then snapped, and a section of the alley floor liquefied and hardened, rising up like a stone jaw to snap shut around the thug's ankles.
The scream that followed made her teeth ache. The other men froze, their heartbeats spiking into a frantic patter-patter that reminded her of a cornered rabbit. To them, the ground had reached up and grabbed their friend. To Toph, it was basic structural reorganization.
She reached out with her mind, feeling the weeping of the earth beneath her. The Parliament had been right to seek a guardian. The planet here was being strangled. Every skyscraper was a nail driven into the world's skin.
"What are you?!" one of the others yelled, pulling a knife. The vibration of the blade was high and sharp.
Toph tilted her head, seeing the metal clearly, the carbon content, the slight nick in the edge, the tremor in the man's grip.
"I'm the one who's going to give this place a haircut," Toph muttered.
She slammed both palms against the alley walls and commanded the metal infrastructure. The iron railings on both sides detached from the brickwork like snakes, flying through the air to wrap around the remaining men.
They were pinned against the walls before they could blink, the metal cooling and tightening until they were little more than ornaments on a building.
She walked past them, her bare feet silent on the now-broken ground. She could feel the heat of the city nearby.
The city was full of concrete, steel, and had no breathing space, its loud activities drowning out the screams of the earth below.
Toph decided to reduce the footprint, because this place was itching her. It was like having a piece of sand in your eye, except the eye was the entire planet and the sand was a sprawling metropolis. She could feel the pressure building, a noise that would drive her crazy unless she started taking things down.
She reached the end of the alley and looked out onto the street. Cars -- moving metal boxes filled with explosions -- zipped by at speeds that made her head spin. The vibrations were chaotic, but beyond the cars there were the towers, gigantic soaring monuments to human arrogance. They were built on bedrock, but they were sucking the life out of it, drawing heat and pressure upward to maintain their artificial climates.
A car slowed down nearby, a sleek black thing vibrating with a much more refined hum than the others. It lingered without stopping. Toph felt eyes on her.
"You should head home, little girl," a voice said over a speaker, deep and modulated and too confident. Toph felt a pulse of air as a window rolled down. The person inside was quiet, and coordinated.
"Call me little again," Toph shot back. The car groaned, and a metallic piece fell from it with clank.
The car stopped.
Toph turned abruptly, her brain itching from a sudden spike of pain from a nearby construction site where a massive drill bored into the limestone for a new foundation.
The sensation was like a drill going into her own tooth. She walked over the hoods of parked cars, ignoring the sidewalk, her footsteps leaving heavy dents in the metal as she used them for traction.
A massive drill screamed as it bit into the earth at a construction site. Toph felt the stone beneath it shattering, crying out as it pulverized into dust.
"Stop," she whispered.
The drill kept screaming.
Toph stepped into the pit, sliding down the dirt embankment until her feet touched the stone at the bottom. The moment she made contact with the bedrock, the city's noise faded into the background. Here, the earth groaned like a giant beast that had slept for ages and was waking up with a headache.
She reached out and grabbed the drill's massive steel shaft with her seismic sense. She used the connection she had with the metal rather than her hands. She felt the rotation, the friction, the heat. Then she told it to be still.
The drill stopped, then fused, the molecules of the steel re-arranging themselves into a solid unmoving block that caused the engine at the top of the rig to explode from the sudden torque.
The silence that followed rang in her ears like a bell. The workers scrambled, shouting in confusion, but Toph was already moving. She could feel the foundation of the neighboring building, half-finished, a skeleton of steel and concrete that stomped on the earth's chest.
"Time to go," she said. She stomped her right foot, sending a massive ripple through the bedrock. She unsettled the building, holding it back from collapse, turning the solid ground beneath the foundation into liquid silt for a moment.
The building groaned, a deep structural sound that vibrated through the air like a dying whale. It tilted, the glass in the lower floors shattering as the frame twisted.
She felt the black car from earlier approaching the site. The quiet man was coming.
Toph smiled, her teeth white against the grime of the construction pit. After decades of being a peaceful hermit in a swamp, a fight was what she needed to drown out the noise of the weeping world.
She climbed out of the pit and stood at the edge of the crater. The wind whipped her hair around her face, its serenity barely registering from the noise climbing through her feet.
"I'll end the screaming," she whispered to the ground beneath her feet. "I am going to make everything quiet."
Behind her, a shadow detached itself from the darkness. No sound, but Toph felt the displacement of air, the subtle shift in the vibration as the quiet man settled on the ground.
He stood there, watching the tilted building, watching the fused drill, and finally, watching her.
"What are you?" he asked.
Toph kept her back to him and felt the metal in his suit, the high-tech alloys, the hidden gadgets, the weight of his utility belt. It was all earth.
"Pissed off," she said, her voice echoing off the concrete walls. "Actually pissed off."