So first things first, how did Jazz end up in the portal? I’m of the opinion that prior to the nonsense that happened with Memory Blank, that Danny went down into the lab alone and triggered the portal like in the intro (afterwards he presumably called Sam and Tucker in a panic, because honestly that’s a fair reaction to literally dying). I’m assuming that for this interpretation of canon events that Danny was alone at home. Honestly there’s no way it could have stayed a secret otherwise. So for this, Jazz comes home early just as Danny wanders into the basement and starts suiting up. I’m thinking that she was studying in the library but figured she should head home because she knew that Danny would probably be there alone and as canon has established, Jazz suffers from very extreme Eldest Child Syndrome and probably has been more a mom to Danny than their actual parents.
I have the scene pictured in my head very clearly of Jazz looking around the house for Danny only to not find him anywhere upstairs or on the main floor and then hearing something from the basement. She goes down and sees Danny in his suit walking into the portal and when Jazz asks what Danny thinks he’s doing, he tells her that he just wants to take a look, see if he finds something their parents didn’t, and also maybe see what was so special about this portal that their parents spent the last few years devoting themselves to it. Jazz–being the responsible one–tries to stop him and pull him out before something bad happens. But she only catches up as his hand finds that ill-placed on switch and they’re BOTH zapped simultaneously.
When Jazz comes to, Danny is already awake and about two steps from a panic attack and Jazz’s first instinct is to comfort him and get him to calm down. She sees what happened to him, obviously, but she hasn’t looked at herself and right now isn’t thinking of the implications. But once she gets Danny to turn away from the mirror and to look at her, he just gets very still and then sobs. Because Danny can see that what happened to him, has happened to Jazz as well. It takes a second for Jazz’s brain to catch up with the apologies that Danny is babbling into her chest, but then she notices that her hands and arms are glowing and her shirt sleeves are white–inverse of the shirt she was wearing earlier, just like how Danny’s suit and hair swapped colors as well.
Jazz probably doesn’t let herself process until way later. After both of them have figured out how to change back (and that they can at all), Jazz tells Danny to gather up as many blankets and pillows as possible to make a pillow fort while she orders them something for dinner (I’m going to say that the Drs Fentons are at some kind of convention/meeting/thing for a few days, so the kids are on their own for now). Just in general trying to help Danny keep calm and not spiral. Except when she tries to pick up a phone to order a pizza or something, her hand passes right through it and it almost breaks her right then and there. But she holds it together (barely) and tries to focus on getting herself and her little brother through the night. They put on their comfort movies and just stick close together for the rest of the night. Later, though, Jazz probably takes a minute or ten to just break down in the bathroom as the enormity of it all sinks in (but of course she doesn’t let Danny see because she knows he’s blaming himself for this happening, so she doesn’t want to make it worse by him seeing her break down over this).
The next day, Danny says he wants to tell Sam and Tucker what happened. He doesn’t want to keep it from his friends (and he doesn’t really even think he can). Jazz’s first thought is “definitely not” because of just how weird this situation is and what if Sam and Tucker let it slip to someone else? Her and Danny would be bigger freaks than they already are. And she’s not even thinking right now about how their parents might react to their children becoming ghosts because one thing that Jazz was especially concerned with in canon was wanting her family to be normal and with her new ghostliness, that desire has a lot more pull. Ultimately what stops her from voicing those thoughts is seeing just how shaken up Danny is from all of this. He needs to tell someone, needs a more robust support network (no thoughts towards herself though). So she agrees and that’s how Tucker and Sam both find out.
Personally, I think that Jazz would have stages with her perception of her new powers and inhumanity. At first, I think she’d just try to ignore it and hope she could continue on as normal without ever having to think about it again. And maybe she could have if the ghosts hadn’t started appearing. Unlike Danny, I think that Jazz would hang back at first. Her instincts seem to lean more towards supporting and staying in the background. After all, what can she do? Probably a lot, but she doesn’t really believe that. Her whole identity has probably been built around how well she supports her family (primarily Danny) and how well she keeps up the facade of normality. Fighting the ghosts wouldn’t be her first instinct. But it is Danny’s. So then Jazz would fall back on her secondary instinct: talking things out. We’ve seen her do this with Freakshow, so I like to think that she sees Danny getting his butt kicked by the Lunch Lady and being unable to stop herself from rushing in and starting up a conversation with her. Maybe for a little bit she manages to calm the Lunch Lady down but the moment she suggests even off-handedly making edits to the menu, her efforts end up wasted. After that, she’d see her powers as tools and a responsibility, so she’d try to learn to use them outside of just suppressing them. She’d probably also make Danny practice with her and at first chide him on using his powers for personal gain because they’re a) dangerous (potentially), and b) if someone sees him, there goes their secret.
Eventually I think that Jazz would try to expand upon her ability to glib a situation because it obviously was working with the Lunch Lady until she violated the terms of the ghost’s obsession. So she keeps trying, thinking of it as practice for a future as a therapist. Of course, this really only works on the more humanoid ghosts, so she’s kind of at a loss for what to do with those.
I also think that Jazz may be torn about her attire in her ghost form. On one hand, it’s very obviously civilian clothes that are specifically hers and they’re not that great at fighting ghosts in. But on the other, it looks more normal, especially compared to the getups that the other ghosts are wearing (Danny included). So while Jazz would feel the urge to change her appearance to make her identity more anonymous (to minimize the chance of being recognized as a ghost by civilians), she also feels the urge to keep it the same because they’re normal clothes. Maybe she manages to swing a more middle-of-the-road design later on, but for the moment she’s just keeping her appearance the same.
I feel like the first time Jazz moves into a more offensive role with her psychoanalysis would be in “Bitter Reunions”. She’s had encounters with Skulker and Technus and Desiree and Sidney already and three out of four of those ghosts were threats. While Danny definitely went the route of brute force, Jazz took over the role of cunning plans. That’s not to say that Danny can’t be cunning on his own, but I don’t think that’s his first instinct. Point is, Jazz’s role to this point would have been primarily support. She’d come up with plans, get gear, spot weaknesses, things like that. But ultimately she’d let Danny be the one to act while she made sure things went smoothly. Vlad would probably be the first ghost she actually started using her skills in psychology to tear into an opponent and strike right at their vulnerabilities. At first she probably wouldn’t suspect much, but when the ghost vulture show up, she definitely gets suspicious, but she doesn’t go ghost around them since Danny has the vultures handled. Plasmius on the other hand is a bit trickier. Danny still gets exposed but when Plasmius changes back into Vlad, Jazz moves in to help get Danny away from him (though this makes Vlad suspicious of Jazz). There’s a lot more tension and Jazz is a lot more active than she was in canon, because she knows about the plot to get Jack killed. So while Danny keeps an eye on Vlad, Jazz instead feigns disinterest and uses the opportunity to snoop and finds Vlad’s lab before Danny is even sent there. She ends up triggering Vlad’s trap herself though and getting exposed to Vlad (though she isn’t stuck in the cube long as Danny comes in not long after). In the end though, Jazz just unloads on him. Vlad thinks himself to be the suave and powerful villain but he is totally unprepared for Jazz to rip into his motivations and desires (namely his aims for Maddie and his lust for power and control). And while ectoblasts might not hurt Vlad, Jazz’s words did a frankly surprising amount of damage which actually gave Danny a bit of an upper hand in fighting him.
From then on, Jazz would probably become something of a profiler and figures out that targeting a ghost’s obsession in the right way can actually weaken them (or at least shake them up). Of course, that’s not her go-to strategy, but troublemaker ghosts like Skulker learn to be wary of her very quickly. Especially when she starts carrying ghost fighting weapons with her, because as we’ve seen in canon, Jazz is quite fit and capable in a fight. In fact, once she gets over her initial apprehension towards getting too involved too publicly, she shows herself to be an even more capable fighter than Danny because while he might have raw power and gumption, Jazz has technique on her side.
I like to think that Jazz’s skills as a halfa would lean more towards the subtle. While Danny and Vlad are capable of massive and visible displays of power, Jazz soon discovers that she’s capable of literally turning her words into weapons. In a way, she’s a bit like Ember and is capable of creating a hypnotic effect with her voice that can make people she targets with it (either intentionally or accidentally) more pliable to her suggestions. Maybe she’d also be capable of some empathetic powers and memory reading. In general, I feel like while Danny’s powers center more around combat, Jazz would have powers that center around utility. Powers that are useful and subtle, which would fit with her fixation on maintaining the facade of normality.
Powers I think Jazz would have (in addition to the base ones Danny has too)
i think duplication would come easier to Jazz too because she’s probably used to multitasking, though her doubles would probably be more illusory
Not sure what kind of core she’d develop, but I do like the idea that if she had an ice core like Danny then she’d make a lot of ice constructs and become really good at making icy fog.
She’d probably have a ghostly wail of her own since she and Danny died simultaneously, but I think it would be kind of split in a way. Danny gets the power to manifest their combined screams in a tangible blast that shatters glass and tears up roads. Jazz, however, gets the power to push their collective fear onto enemies, which often ends up paralyzing them.
Now for Spectra. Like I said in my tags, I really think it would be cool to give Jazz her own nemesis in the form of halfa!Spectra. Not quite sure exactly how old Spectra would be, but I’d think she’s going into her hundreds, so I’ll say she’d be about 105. She would have turned at about late 40s so she’d have had about 60 odd years experience. Now, she turned herself into a halfa in the hopes of prolonging her life and youth and while for the purposes of this I’ll say that halfas age very slowly compared to normal humans, Spectra’s transformation was imperfect. She would have lived in the early 1900s, so her access to the technology that Jack and Maddie would later invent would have been nonexistent, so Spectra would probably have fallen back on folklore and spiritualism in order to transform herself. Of course, while Spectra is intelligent, her smarts lay more in the realm of the social game (I like to think she was from a very well-to-do family, which is why she had the time, reasoning, and resources to dabble in this at all) than in the complex calculations that such an endeavor would require. So while she does turn into a halfa, her transformation wasn’t entirely stable. It’s like how in “Doctors Disorders” she said she had to keep feeding off of people to keep herself young and needed something to stabilize her form. So while Vlad likes to play at being a vampire (given his appearance), Spectra functionally is one. In the early years she did literally feed on people’s blood but as it got harder to drain people without wider society noticing the trail of bodies she leaves behind her, she had to change up her strategy to feeding off of emotions rather than blood. She moves around quite a bit so people don’t notice her agelessness or the sudden spike in depression and misery that follows her as easily but does have an old family manor that she stays in and has as her home base.
Halfa!Spectra’s dynamic with Vlad would be really fun. I think they’d absolutely despise each other given how they’re both egotistical drama queens with a love of being in control. If they team up, they both probably would do so thinking that they’re using each other for their own ends but then keep butting heads and getting in each other’s way. Spectra would be old money and Vlad would be new money, so there’d be some elitism in there, especially since Spectra would have more experience than Vlad (though like Jazz, her powers lean more towards utility than combative), so he’d be like a child in her eyes while in Vlad’s she’d be a stuck up old lady who talks big but can’t always back up her statements on her own power.
And while Vlad would probably still manipulate Valerie into working for him as the Red Huntress, I like to think that Spectra would end up teaming up with Freakshow given that they’d run in the same circles. Spectra might even manipulate him into believing that she’ll turn him into a halfa if he does xyz for her (kind of a vampire and thrall situation). And while Vlad would be more of the hardcore science villain, Spectra would be more well versed in spiritualism and ghost lore, so maybe Vlad’s stunt with Pariah Dark would be part his own ambition for power and part thumbing his nose as Spectra in her own field of expertise.
I think Spectra’s interest in Jazz would be similar to Vlad’s in Danny. She’d see Jazz as somewhere between a kindred spirit and a potentially useful pawn. She’d probably spin it as protegee but really she’d be interested in having Jazz as a sidekick and a tool to use. Plus, given that Jazz and Danny’s transformations into halfas was damn near flawless, they’d probably possess the necessary element Spectra needs to stabilize her aging… (she’d probably be more interested in Jazz than Danny because it would be more of a challenge for Spectra to get under her skin)
As for Bertrand, I’d either have him be a full ghost Spectra allied with or–for the sake of paralleling her with Vlad even more–her pet that she replaces with a near identical animal every time it dies.
Other bits that I think would be neat:
Jazz eventually being coaxed into lightening up while in ghost form, kind of using it as an opportunity to do the playing around she never got to do as a kid. (probably at the start Jazz would never use her powers for recreational purposes, but as she gets more comfortable, I could totally seeing her using duplication to do more studying or flight to get places faster or reach things on high shelves).
Their first encounter with Youngblood would probably be the true start of that.
Danny and Jazz bonding and covering for each other
Most of the ghosts being lowkey scared of Jazz because she eventually gets so good at verbally tearing into ghosts and their vulnerabilities that she has the very real potential of tearing a ghost’s core apart with her words and observations alone.
Jazz probably becoming lowkey eldritch, which unfortunately drives the more “normal” people away from her but fortunately attracts the outcasts in her own grade.
There would probably be more space for exploring ghost culture and lore because while Jazz definitely can destroy a ghost with her observations, she’s much more interested in learning about the ghosts and their mentalities, so that does a lot to temper her and Danny’s relations to other ghosts in the Zone.
Johnny trying his little con on Jazz like he did in canon but instead getting couples therapy and returning to the ghost zone feeling baffled but more at ease.
Sidney gets looped into Jazz’s friend group at some point.
Jazz and Danny trying to fight Freakshow. At one point, Jazz probably uses her headband as a blindfold so she doesn’t look at Freakshow’s staff and instead relies on her empathetic powers to figure out where everyone is.
