My Deeda's Instruction Manual

(Samantha)

Spoiler :

Well today is my birthday! Happy birthday to me!!

[th_091_-2.gif]

Anyway I decided to celebrate by doing the Hobit tradition of giving people presents! So here is a chapter

(hopefully I will be able to do another one by the end of December making this at least a two chapter release month but no promises unfortunately)

As part of the party I am even including a bonus illustration!! (OOOOH!)

Done by me (Sarcastic yay)

I know I suck. (please have mercy)

Well...this isn't supposed to be that serious of a fanfic/webnovel anyway...

Please enjoy the chapter, I wrote it just for you!~

In the past it was easy to become emotional and then overly stubborn. This would happen often and though I felt guilty the conclusion to any ‘conflict’ would happen in either one of two ways. I would either abandon her without explanation or apology, even if I had been helping her with something beforehand. Or I would give in to my baser urges and squabble with her like a little child.

One of the main reasons I hadn’t spent much time with her in the past was because I abhorred those kind of results. Remembering my apprehension in the beginning to spend so much time with her I was pleasantly surprised that my fears were easily realized. When I learned the correct way to handle her.

For example when it came to doing homework, whenever she got off track I would just present some clear logical reasons as to why I wanted what I was asking. I would proceed to debate a bit with her and after a token amount of reluctance (despite appearances) she would acquiesce. There was more to it than this, but it is a bit hard to explain and that is the gist of it.

The usually calm and sometimes even cheerful way we acted around each other then was quite the improvement over the not so distant past which would end up with either I or Ramona throwing the textbook at the floor and screaming at each other, and this is just one example there were probably hundreds of little tricks that I had learned that made everything so much easier.

You may be a bit confused when I say this, but the way I learned these new Ramona handling methods of mind was not through experimentation or observation, but because she told me.

Yes you heard me right, Ramona had actually written an instruction manual about herself and proceeded to give it to me in pieces and parcels as time went on. Seeing its effectiveness I started to wonder why she didn’t do this for our parents or others I had heard she had trouble with at school.

I mean the uses were obvious, as I knew from personal experience, not long after I started to get the hang of dealing with her, all the little botherations I had with her in past vanished, almost without a trace.

When I asked she gave me a serious look and said.

“What makes you think that I didn’t try to give this information to others? I did in fact try to many times, but they would either insist that I didn’t know what I was talking about, that it wasn’t their methods that needed to change but Ramo herself.

But Ramona can’t change herself… not even if she wanted to, and even if Ramona tried to be what they wanted her to be one little slip up and it was like all the work she did didn’t happen, and they would get angry when Ramona said that maybe other way…would have more effect on Ramona’s behavior.

Besides, usually them not believing Ramona was actually not the worst result.”

Hesitantly almost not wanting to know, I asked.

“Then what was the worst result?”

She paused for a long moment then said almost expression then with pain.

“That they would use Romona’s information against her, that they would learn from it but instead of using it to help and talk to Ramona they would use it to manipulate her, and more worse would lie to others…in control and use them indirectly to…do things to Ramona.”

“What things.”

I asked feeling a bit angry at the thought of someone hurting my sister on purpose, while my other siblings would often mock her for her so called ‘mental disabilities’ even when I hadn’t cared much for her I had hugely disliked when anyone did this. I never could see the entertainment found in mocking someone for things that were out of their control.

She told me. It was the first time that I had felt so much anger about another person, actually it was the first time I had felt so much emotion about anyone. In the past, all my relationships with others including to the rest of my family had been really shallow and I hadn’t had enough of a connection to feel much no matter what happened.

But once I had started to really open up to Ramona I had started to change, I felt things more deeply more strongly than I ever had before. At the same time however, I had felt that I hadn’t changed at all and I was the exact same person, only seeing things a little differently.

It was kind of a queer sort of feeling but I didn’t hate it. Although I got angry more easily and felt sad more often, I also felt far happier than I ever had and any fun experience was far more pleasurable then I could ever remember even my past memories of trying it for the first time.

Yes I didn’t hate it and I didn’t regret. Though I had lost my old way of life I had gained a new one, a life in which I realized that I rather than finding a sister I discovered that I had never lost one in the first place.

The realization as well as her confession about some of her past experience made us much closer, and soon after I got her to strict to a schedule involving homework she not only started to bring her own homework with her when she visited but she also was not afraid to talk to me about it, or be asked about my own. Unsurprisingly we ended up helping each other study.

Although she was a few years older than me, this was not as far-fetched as it sounds. She had been held back in a few classes (specifically math and one other, the later she said was because the teacher hadn’t liked her) and I had advanced in a few classes early because of my place on honor roll.

Despite what her failures might incline some people to think, she was not stupid as I had heard her been called in the past. Actually she was quite intelligent. Some of the questions in my homework that I struggled with she would show me how to get the answer quite easily, and in a way that was easy for me to understand and remember.

Unfortunately I learned more from her rather than the other way around. Though I had gained some patience from my recent understanding of her, I still got annoyed when she failed to see the very obvious and especially when she asked the same question for the nth time, when I had answered it for as equally as many.

In fact it was when we were going through that annoying process that I soon had another revelation about my life, one which would change more than just myself and my view of Ramona.

“So when you divide here, you just use the XXX method and you end up with x=...”

“-so that minus that…and then ex-ii equals 1 right!?”

Ramona interrupted me excitement in her voice. She is just like a little kid, I thought, wasn’t she reaching her majority soon and she was still this immature? No wonder some of those teacher’s got angry at her…

I scratched that disloyal thought and sighed, just when I was about to reply with what I suspected to end up as either a rebuke at her interrupting me or my opinion that she hadn’t used the right method even though she had gotten the right answer, when the loud annoying voice of our ‘deeda’ (older sister) Lucy interrupted.

“What is she doing here?” She sneered.

The rest of my family, who hadn’t visited in a while were standing in the doorway.