In any given tense situation, Jazz is not going to be the one to start a fight.
Jazz is small and perky, and very rarely even clumsy. She has the kind of body that could charitably be called "slender" but is more realistically "twiggy." She dresses modestly and practically – button-up shirts, long skirts with deep pockets, in every shade of blue she can find. (Dad does all the sewing and mending, which is how she can afford long skirts and full sleeves in the first place.) When dragged off to some blasted wilderness by her myth-chasing parents, or otherwise occupied with tasks that require free movement, she swaps her skirts for trousers and points anyone who argues at her mother.
Jazz really wishes her mother was here right now, and not just because Mom could break a man's neck one-handed. She's not completely sure that Mom could help, anyway; because there is Spectra too-tall in the dimming light orange light of a fall sunset, eyes glittering red like her snappy tunic-dress, red like spell-glass. Nothing like human.
Jazz shoves the goggles into place, and foggy half-there images sharpen and reveal:
Her little brother, not disappeared into the aether but radiant, clothed in the colors of the ruins and a long-dead god. (Or not so dead. ...he always did have a talent for digging up strange things.)
And sharp, sharp claws digging through his sides, tearing past cloth through flesh. That the color he bleeds makes her eyes hurt, even through the reflective red glass, doesn't matter. Danny is Danny is hers to protect, and she is going to get him back safe, and she is going to make them pay.
Of all the many, many roads her life could have taken, Jazz never in her worst nightmares dreamed that someday she would be all that stood between her little brother and a dark spirit trying to eat his mind.
(And steal his place as the local deity, but she's just... going to shelve that little revelation. Not for long, just until she's alone with the door barred and a thick stack of fresh note-paper on hand.)
Carefully, as silently as she can, Jazz searches through the side pockets of her bag until she finds what she's looking for. It's just a small jar, dull gray glazed in green and white. She unscrews the top, and spools of shining metal burst out and twine around her limbs. She has to fight not to shake. The wires twine through her hair, binding it back (for one sharp moment she thinks to herself that maybe she should have cut it short, there's no time) and hook into the leather loops of her red-glass mask.
The wires burn where they brush bare skin, leaving numbness behind. She's never used it before, never actually thought she'd need to, but she recognizes the symptoms of magical overload from Mom's studies. She also recognizes that this feeling could easily be mistaken for invulnerability. For all that this armor will protect her from the side effects of the Peeler (her father's naming sense is truly unparalleled) it's still just a shell, thin and flimsy and easily pushed aside. Her greatest ally against these creatures is surprise.
Jazz huddles in the shadow of a crumbling wall, radiant in twisted wire and caged light. She presses against the wall, tests her weight.
Well, then. Shock and awe, she can most definitely do.
Her left hand digs into the rain-pitted stone as she launches herself up and over. Her right foot (don't plant yet) touches earth and she lets her momentum spin her around until she's facing the enemy. Jazz sets her stance and fires.
Bertrand comes crashing down like a sack of hammers, toothy bear shape melting away into so much unidentifiable muck. Oh, ew.
Jazz hates the use of magic, the necessity of prayers, but she can't discount how utterly lifeless the youth of Amity Park have grown in these past weeks. Were she an ounce less a concerned citizen, she might have missed the warning signs that heralded a deep depression. ...or, quite possibly, possession. (Wounds of the spirit, down to the soul.)
She's not entirely certain now how much of this apparition is Danny and how much a spirit, but if there is anything left of her little brother then she will defend him to her last breath. ...she really hopes she won't have to.
From how quickly her armor's initial power boost is fading (and taking that headache-inducing green light with it) she has maybe half a minute before Spectra's horrible-nasty aura can reach her again and-
(alone alone always alone no one likes you little girl you know better than that sad pathetic little creature poor misguided little prodigy let's see you burn out)
-if that was how it felt when Spectra wasn't even focused on her, Jazz really couldn't afford to get hit.
(Don't think about it, don't even let it cross her mind.
Danny, broken and crumpled on the ground. Danny, a spiraling cloud of light only recognizable through spell-glass. Danny, her little brother the broken god.
She hates her parents sometimes. And Spectra grows stronger with her victims' pain, so- Not thinking about it!)
The woman is screaming, rattling off curses that Jazz can see fizzling out against her armor. Where they hit, the metal flares briefly, then dulls. She's not going to last.
She waits, lets Bertrand shift snake and then strikes. Her pocketknife goes through his neck, iron reflecting light (it almost looks like it's glowing). She keeps running.
Bertrand screams. Spectra screams. Her hands crab out like claws, and something in Jazz's mind whispers poison.
Jazz steadies her grip, feeds every scrap of attention she can spare into breaking Spectra and fires again.
If that first unfocused shot was a torch, this is midsummer-noon sunlight focused through a lens. Not as fire but as a blade, many blades – dozens of tiny razors and awls and scalpels that fix themselves under Spectra's skin and pull. It's gruesome, really, knowing that this monster could pass for human. (Might have been human not long ago, or centuries ago. If the evil witches of children's stories are real, who's to say they can't be as old as those stories?)
There's nothing human about her now. She's a negative space, a screaming pit in the half-light of the alleyway. (Now Jazz knows why Mom said not to look through red-glass without supervison. She's pretty sure the memory of Spectra's ghostfire eyes is going to scar.)
Spectra was aging and then she was old, and now she is black not-fire and claws and hate. The armor is out of power, and Jazz is out of ideas, and no not Danny!
There are certain weaknesses common to all spirits - as much as humans cannot quite grasp their existence, so spirits never understand human power.
Jazz believes in Danny.
(Not that he isn't often wrong, or that he can't lose, but that he will always always find a solution to whatever mess he's gotten himself into. It's how he might get hurt along the way that scares her. (It's that she couldn't save him soon enough that hurts worst.))
A net of white-blue light tears open the evening, closing over Spectra's claws and Bertrand's reforming fangs. It dissipates, leaving a child-god and a human girl to explain the absolute mess left in the wake of this day's chaos.
The spirit turns to the girl (who he most certainly does not recognize, and therefore could not possibly be related to in any way). "Are you all right-" he breaks off the sentence with a choked noise. It could have been ice cracking, a stick of chalk snapping in her hand. It could have begun her name.
Jazz presses her lips together, breathing deeply and slowly. (Her right side is going to be one big bruise tomorrow, she can feel it.)
"Wait, no, that's not what I meant." He shakes his head sharply, as though clearing mental cobwebs. (As though she hasn't seen Danny do that a hundred times.) "You should see a priest about this. There's no telling what kind of spiritual grossness they might have left on you."
Okay, Danny knows perfectly well that the only temple anywhere nearby has been defunct for centuries. (For a moment, she doubts – not her brother, but her own memories. Perhaps he left, and she didn't see it?)
The next thing she knows, she's alone. The armor is now nothing but a heap of copper weighing down her clothes, and-
She can smell smoke. Probably from the misaimed fireworks. It was definitely time to left.
(And found Danny and checked him for injuries and made absolutely sure that Spectra had made no wounds that would not heal, because-
well, it wasn't like she could get at Spectra now anyway.)
Later, Jazz will go to the temple. There she will find her brother's handprints inked into the walls.
(It doesn't matter. He's safe now. And if he isn't, she's going to make it so.)
Jazz has never been one to start a fight, but she isn't nice enough to ever leave one unfinished.