Here's my Episode 15 end scene.
Susan sat in her room, during what she hoped was the final hours of her grounding. At her desk, she had her English Comp homework on her large computer screen, and some books on the desk. The books were old, with titles that seemed to be written in some ancient language, possibly Hebrew, though others were totally unrecognizable. It was those books to which she was paying more attention.
There was a knock on her door, one that was soft and tentative, but one that the audience could swear was trying to sound authoritative. Quickly, Susan pulled a composition notebook over the open leather bound text, obviously trying to hide it.
"Come in...
The door to Susan's bedroom opened up, and her mother walked in, looking, if anything, more glamorously dressed and made up than her daughter. She smiled in the same way she'd knocked, a veneer of authority covering a tentative uncertainty.
"um...hello, honey? Your father and I were talking...and we think that you've, you know, learned your lesson. So tomorrow, you'll be ungrounded. Sound good, sweetie?"
Susan nodded, smiling with a relief that she didn't feel, but one that she knew would make her mother happy.
"Thank you, Mother. Don't worry, I certainly did."
She gave a little chuckle, one that her mother shared. A proverbial mother daughter bonding moment.
"Okay, sweetie, have a good night. We'll see you at breakfast."
Closing the door, Susan was soon left alone. More or less.
A ghostly presence, translucent and wavering, appeared, looking like some Old World Grandmother.
The ghostly old woman sneered at the closed door.
"THAT is why I never chose her. Even though she's my granddaughter, I knew she'd never learn what I could teach. She's too weak. She wants to be loved, more than she wants to be right. I blame her husband for that, my daughter's husband before her. Men so trapped in the material world that they dragged their womenfolk with them. I'm glad, at least, I got to you before you were spoiled by some man. "
The woman's thick accent, sounding partly Russian, partly Yiddish, and partly something from the Bronx, was very distinctive.
Susan smirked and rolled her eyes, both knowing the irony in that statement, even if it was true to an extent. The young woman looked up at her dead great grandmother.
"The funny thing is, Buddee Kappy, my 'isolation' has actually given me more time to study my magic and whatnot than I'd have had if I'd been free to do whatever I wanted."
She sighed with a wry smile at that, but also raised a pensive eyebrow at the last few days. The brunette looked in the small mirror over her desk, distracted by her eyebrows, which looked like they'd been professionally sculpted and trimmed.
The ghost chuckled hoarsely.
"Heh...you're starting to get your mother's vanity, that's for sure. Don't worry, 'sweetie', your eyebrows are very pretty."
Susan rolled her eyes, not without amusement or affection, and smiled.
"That's Mother's doing, or at least her insistence. This whole family had a tendency towards bushy eyebrows and hairy legs..."
The young Jewish girl gave a snarky look at the older woman, as if the ghost's slightly whiskery face and bushy eyebrows, the latter of which put a lumberjack to shame, was 'Exhibit A'. Bubbee Kappy sneered, also not without affection.
"All that plucking and shaving! Bah!!! You modern girls look more like little poodle dogs than women! In MY day, people didn't worry about such dross!"
The pretty schoolgirl chuckled.
"Well, in 'your day', no one knew any better. But these days we have more options, something I've been 'reminded' of on a daily basis by my mother, and that trimming and shaving was on par with being a 'lady of class and respectability'. And if ever get lax and didn't pluck stray hairs from my eyebrows, her mother would chase me around with tweezers like some eyebrow obsessed tiger.
"But, as weird and alien as they seem to me sometimes, and as neurotic and flawed as they seemed at other times, this family a part of me, for better or worse."
She seemed to be pondering something, and Bubbee Kappy smiled knowingly.
"Pondering your latest misadventure, are you? Pondering and wondering, just wondering, if you'd actually won or lost."
The old woman smirked, cackling lightly.
"Sure, you've escaped back to your own world, with everything more or less back to the way it was before you left it. If, that is, you'd left it at all and the whole fakakta thing wasn't all in your head. But now, you're thinking, 'what have you lost, yes?
"Your two 'sisters', provided they weren't more than just some weird fever dream, had been very powerful, independent, and, one of them at least, very self assured. I mean, for crying out loud, girlie, everything you ever wanted to be, yes?
So, you're wondering if maybe you chose wrongly by rejecting whatever shortcut those dingbats were offering? Provided they weren't just hallucinations, they WERE very powerful. But, at what cost, eh? What cost indeed?"
Susan suppressed a slight smirk and muttered to herself.
"...for a dead chick you really like to talk, don'tcha?....."
"What was that dear?"
"Nothing, just, um...thinking about what you're saying..."
She smiled innocently, though both better.
Sniffing dismissively, the ghost continued her lecture.
"As I always say, though perhaps not often enough, there were no real shortcuts in magic. Anything that seems like it was an easy way to do things always had some hidden cost or bad effect. What had those two suffered? You might never know. I know that you were hoping to learn by questioning them, though they'd been so evasive and vague about their lives.
"Which, my little sparrow, was a good indication that their 'method' had some drawbacks, yes? Or, just maybe, a good indication that they weren't real. Both make an interesting problem, don't they?"
Susan sighed and pushed her chair away from her desk for a moment with a heavy sigh of frustrated resignation, then chuckled ruefully, shrugging.
"Well, Bubbee Kappy, maybe THAT was my answer. I mean, I probably could, of course, become much more proficient at magic if I did nothing else. Like, if I ran away from home, perhaps with enough of my stuff, all the knick knacks and 'chotchkes' to pawn to start a simple and meager life somewhere else, maybe in Boston, or maybe even Metropolis, doing nothing but practicing magic and studying.
She sighed, biting her lip pensively as she seemed to imagine that alternate life.
"But...what kind of life was that? No, that wasn't the way to live my life. What use was it to be the proverbial Enlightened Guru On the Mountain, gifted and knowledgeable beyond measure, if ones only interaction with the world was the occasional people wandering by the cave to ask 'why is life like a fountain?'"
Bubbee Kappy laughed her playful cackle.
"HA!! That's funny. You'd be crazy in a week!"
Then she looked at her young apprentice with a thoughtful expression.
"You, little girl...you envy her friends, don't you? I know that. You feel like an outsider sometimes, even among these weird 'outsiders' you're so friendly with. Zoey and Rory, for all their 'freakishness', are always so confident in their abilities. Or at least it seems so to you, am I right?
And Allura, the angry girl who complained about being 'the boring normal one' was, if anything, even MORE confident, acting without hesitation even in the face of situations that would make a Cosack pee themselves just a little.
"Then...there's you.... "
Susan nodded, sighing with a rueful determination.
"That's the million dollar question, isn't it. With all these amazing people, who am I to think I belong among them?
An Atlantean, a telepath, and a badass redhead. And there's me. Who is Susan Eisenberg?"
Standing up, the young woman moved to the full length mirror on her closet door. She looked at herself, her smile, as always, turning into a self-deprecating cringe. She spoke to her ghostly great grandmother, her eyebrow raised thoughtfully.
"Even after all this time, I still can't get used to my appearance."
Her ghostly tutor chuckled snidely.
"Yes, my pretty poppet, that outfit, while casual by your vain mother's standards, was fancy enough to be acceptable at the best restaurants in town, or even in Gotham City. Your make-up was impeccable, something her mother insisted upon at all times ('One never knows when one will get visitors, does one?')."
"It must be incredibly disconcerting to see such a stranger in the mirror. Even I sometimes am having trouble remembering, what you used to look like. My pretty little Susie had a different look every year, it seemed."
Raising a hand to touch her face, Susan sighed a little, chuckling in rueful agreement.
"Obviously I don't remember, but I know that my appearance is so very different than pictures from "Susan's Goth/Satanic Period". That period, for obvious reasons, was a bit of a blur. I'm actually grateful that I have no memories of that period, which also, I'm told, included a stay in a posh upstate sanitarium.
"It's kind of funny, really. Many of the kids at school still believe the rumor that Sheri Lebowitz started, that I'd spent time in Arkham Asylum. The scary thing is that I know that, should I stress my parents too much, that upstate sanitarium was still, technically an option."
Bubbee Kappy laughed, not unkindly.
"No, no, my little actress. You've fooled everyone so far, at least the people you blabbed to. Can't say I'm a fan of that, girlie, but it's your life."
Susan smiled, then nodded, as a thought suddenly occurred to her.
"Yeah, that's it, isn't it? This is MY life.
Who was 'Susan Eisenberg'? That's up to me, isn't it?
I'm not the snooty "mean girl" from several years ago.
I'm not the crazed, magic obsessed harpy who drove all her friends and family away only a year before.
Maybe I'm the insecure, sometimes angry, sometimes terrified, fashionable and nerdy, magical amalgam of everything that came before, including things that I prefer not to dwell on, even in her darkest and most private thoughts."
Taking a deep breath, the young woman looked at the mirror, and tried to look more confident than she felt.
"I...I am Susan Eisenberg."
Then she chuckled, feeling very self conscious.
"I...I am Elmer Fudd. Millionaire. I own a mansion and a yacht."
Susan burst out laughing. She shook her head, feeling the tension leaving her body.
The ghost made a rude noise.
"Always with the jokes, this one. We have SO much more work to do."
Susan went back to her desk, smiling and getting back to work.
" Don't worry, Bubbee Kappy, I know who I am. I'm Susan Eisenberg, part time witch, part time hero, full time student.... "
"And full time pain in my tuckus..."
Chuckling, Susan shook her head.
"Now, now, Bubbee. We're wasting time. What's the next lesson?"
