Death is a personal thing.
To be sure, everyone dies eventually, and, in that, if nothing else, they are equal. But no two people know death the same way. No two people are touched by death the same way. No two people see death in the same way. No two people are taken by death in the same way.
And no one may know another's death. Not beyond a glimpse through a window at night, not beyond a tale of a country undiscovered.
That country of death was much the same.
The Ghost Zone. The Spirit World. The Infinite Realms.
Many names. Many faces. Many forms.
It was personal.
.
Vlad Masters knew what the Ghost Zone looked like. He had worked with Jack and Maddie to extrapolate its composition and appearance long before they'd even gotten the proto-portal running from the tiny samples of ectoplasm they'd been able to synthesize.
Once they had… Well. Even the small uncertainty he'd had before was gone. The Ghost Zone was green and pulsating pain, ooze and rot, twisted abominations and power.
He could feel it inside him, even in the hospital, even dying from ecto-acne. He knew. He knew.
And his knowledge was vindicated the first time he stepped through a portal.
.
Danny grew up hearing stories about ghosts, even if he didn't believe in them. Stories about how evil they were, generally, but also about what the Ghost Zone was supposed to be like. Vast voids. Glowing ectoplasm. Islands of stability.
It shaped him. But it wasn't the only thing that did that.
(He remembered, distantly, Grandpa Fenton saying that he was going on one, last, long journey…)
He stood in front of the empty porta, smiling. "You're right. Who knows what kind of awesome, super-cool things exist on the other side of that portal?"
Danny didn't know. But he imagined. He imagined a journey of a lifetime, of a death, of an eternity.
The light that killed him and saved him was green, but it was followed by diamond-studded black.
His first journey into the Ghost Zone showed him a world of wonder. Eternal night stretched as far as the eye could see, strewn with luminescent islands - each a wandering star, populated by strange trees, strange fruits, strange beings, strange technology, all glowing in the dark.
.
For Sam, the Ghost Zone was a vast wilderness full of extinct and endangered creatures. All those things Sam cared so much about saving. All the things humanity had failed to save. All the things humanity had driven into the dark.
Not only a wilderness - a hungry, grasping wilderness. Beautiful, but deadly and eager to take.
It was about her activism. Her passions. Her understanding of killing.
(It was really about Danny.)
(About losing him.)
(About dooming him.)
(About killing him.)
(Making him a member of a not-quite-species with only three members.)
But she could find her place here, too. She knew. The jungles, the deserts, the mountains, the tundra. The creeping vines, the snarling beasts, the towering trees. There was a place here for her.
.
The Ghost Zone was dead, and to Tucker Foley dead meant two things. Broken tech and hospitals.
His version of the Ghost Zone had both. Great landfills and huge, almost industrial buildings that seemed to ooze illness and injury in an apocalyptic landscape. There was rust and gray in the sky, streaked with mossy, algae-like green. Verdigris. Even gold oxidized and crumbled.
The thing was, junk could be repurposed. Broken things could be fixed, or scavenged for parts. Brought back to life, as it were.
He just had to avoid the hospitals, and everything would be fine.
.
First and foremost, Jazz's view of the Ghost Zone and ghosts in general was colored by the general concept of 'her brother, the superhero.'
This was the world beyond the portal for her. One where death wasn't, and she still didn't have to see.
.
Valerie hated the Ghost World and everything in it. It was a bottomless pit that did nothing but take and take and take.
… It did seem a little different, though, after the first time she'd actually worked with Phantom. There seemed to be other changes after her second suit. The whole place just felt more inviting.
But surely that was all in her head.
.
And Jack and Maddie? Well. They already knew everything there was to know about ghosts… and they knew they weren't 'souls of the dead' or any such nonsense. They were simply monsters from another dimension! One made of ectoplasm and energy! A green world! An exciting world!
A hostile world.
One that would do anything it could to lie to them, to trick them, to kill them. Just like the ghosts that inhabited it.
That's why they needed the Specter Speeder and all their other protective gear.
That's why they needed protective gear, unlike, say, Sam, who could walk through her wilderness unharmed, so long as she kept an eye out for prehistoric megafauna, or Tucker, who'd had to get his tetanus shot renewed after a nasty fall into a junk pile that first week. The Ghost Zone would destroy them, just like they tried to destroy it.
That was just what death was like, after all.