Prologue 1: Someone From Before, Ma Cheri Amour

BOOM!

"Aaand cut! That was perfect!"

Baby Herman came out of the billowing smoke, coughing. "If I get another bomb blown up in my face one more time…!"

"Jeepers, Baby Herman, it's more rousing than a cup of coffee!" A silhouette of a rabbit followed after him in the smoke. Roger broke out from the cloud, covered in ash. "It's like an exploding epiphany! A kindling kaboom! A-"

"Dangerous explosive that can burn off your fur like last time."

Roger twisted around at the voice. A damp towel suddenly blanketed his vision. Fumbling with it, he finally lifted the towel, peek-a-boo style. "Jessica! You're still here!"

His friend shrugged her bare shoulders.

The rabbit bounced into a chair and began to rub himself with a towel. He could have just shaken off the ashes but Jessica was a thoughtful girl. Sometimes he wondered why people often looked surprised by the fact. "Thanksth!" he said.

Jessica leaned back on the table beside him silently, watching his rigorous rigmarole. She suddenly dusted off the ash on the red tuft of his hair.

"Heeeey!" Roger protested, ducking from her hand with a grin. "What am I? A dog?" He suddenly jumped on the table and crouched down on all fours. "Woof!" Rabbit ears folded into dog ears as his cottontail began to wag excitedly.

"Roger…" she said warningly. Jessica should never have told him she doesn't like laughing out loud in public. It caused more people to stare. Since then, little games like this would occur between them.

Her friend made a sad puppy face. His "dog" ears drooped down like a chastised canine. He sat in his haunches with a wounded whimper. Jessica crossed her arms in front of her, her face a stoic stone.

But for some reason, Roger always seemed to know otherwise. One ear cocked at her expression. Crap. Now he's not going to stop. "Woof!" His wagging tail caught his attention and he chased it around in circles.

Her lips pressed harder into a grimmer line. He was really milking the joke.

"Oof!" A crash followed as he fell off the table.

Jessica blinked and looked down –at Roger lying like a dog hoping for a belly rub.

Her friend gave her a triumphant grin as she covered her mouth, her shoulders shaking for the flittest moment. Roger: 7, Jessica: 3.

"You really don't quit," she said with amused resentment, tucking her hair behind her ear.

Before she could chastise him further, a pink toon butterfly fluttered by, catching her attention. A shaft of sunlight brightened from a doorway before someone walked in.

A rabbit toon appeared, a doe. Her honey blonde fur gleaming in the light as she turned around as though looking for someone. She walked delicately, like a nymph on spring grass, around the busy studio. Her long rabbit wavy ears swayed behind her back as she turned her head this way and that. Finally, her eyes settled on Roger who was still lying prone on the floor.

"Roger?" her soft voice rang clearly over the din.

Said rabbit suddenly lifted himself up. Jessica saw his eyes widen in recognition… and surprise? He stood up and slowly turned around –before he ran toward her like a lost desert explorer to an oasis.

Roger tripped upon the doe's feet and she softly put a hand on her lips with a giggle. She held up her hands to pull him up. But Roger stood up before her with the same reverence a commoner would bestow upon a princess.

"Cheri!" he exclaims.

Jessica raised a brow in surprise. Did he just call her "dear" in French?

Hearing them was hard, they were talking some distance away. The doe threw her arms around Roger and squeezed him.

The doe released him with a laugh and said something Jessica couldn't hear. Roger rubbed the back of his head embarrassedly, shuffling his feet.

Jessica stared at him. Since when did he become shy?

She turned around to see if anyone recognized her. From a distance she can see Herman's human nanny, Poppins, watching them.

"Jessica!"

The nanny turned her back on them. Before Jessica could ponder on that, she felt someone tug her hand.

"Jessica, I want you to meet Cheri Cottontail," Roger said, a big smile on his face. "Cheri, Jessica."

Jessica did not miss the tiny frown that crossed the doe's face when she looked at her. Nonetheless, the doe held out a white gloved hand, "Bonjour!"

Cheri was roughly two feet tall, she made Roger's 3-foot frame looked slim and stretched. The singer stooped with one hand on her chest and took the doe's hand, shaking it.

"It's a pleasure," she said.

Roger beamed at them. "Jessica is a singer! You should have heard her sing! She's incredible!"

"That's nice," Cheri said. She tucked her arm around his. "Roger, can we have lunch together? I know a place that serves a great carrot soup."

Feeling that she's being dismissed, Jessica took her leave. "I have to go."

Roger gave his friend a confused glance, "But Jessica, I thought-"

She shook her head, "I just hanged around to make sure I'm not needed in the set again," glancing at the intimate way the doe has both of her hands around Roger's arm.

"Do you want to come with us?" the doe asked. For a moment, Jessica wondered if she only asked out of courtesy.

"Perhaps some other time," she murmured.

Cheri nodded and turned Roger away. "Okay, Jessica. Au revoir!"

Jessica could hear her chatting about the restaurant as they walked away. Roger looked back at Jessica and gave her a final wave before turning to hear what Cheri was saying.

The pink butterfly, followed by a blue and yellow one, fluttered after them.

Now where did those came from? Jessica grabbed her purse and turned to see Poppins looking at her once again.

The nanny nodded and they both began to walk in the same direction, Jessica matching Poppins' no-nonsense stride with a graceful catwalk of her long legs. Neither of them was a patron of small talk and both were content with the companionable silence.

The silence stretched between them. To one side, a young woman clothed in a fashionable dress buttoned up to her neck, a flowery carpetbag in hand. To the other, a humanoid toon woman in a slinky red dress displaying a flash of her legs with every step.

Jessica's eyes wandered to the walls they passed by. She had always assumed he was a bachelor. Roger never mentioned he had a girl-

"Who is she?" she asked, finally breaking the soundless monotony.

Poppins whipped her head around with a frown as though she had just butchered their sacred contemplation.

"Who's who?" she asked back.

"Cheri Cottontail," Jessica answered.

Poppins raised a brow. "Then why are you asking?"

Jessica took a deep breath. Straightlaced as the nanny tends to be, there was a reason why she enjoyed the silence between them.

"You don't seem to like her so much," she pointed out.

Poppins raised the other eyebrow, both now widened with a cool air to them. "I don't 'seem', Jessica. You shouldn't make assumptions, you know."

The nanny gave a displeasured sniff that always made Herman want to push her off a ledge. "When Cheri comes, Cheri goes."

Jessica looked at her blankly as they turned a corner. When Poppins isn't being snippy, she's as cryptic as Wonderland's Caterpillar.

"She'll be back tomorrow," the nanny explained, "and the next day and the next day until she'll leave."

Jessica digested this new piece of information. Since she's still new to the studio, she still has a lot to learn about them.

"What do you know about her?" she asked, inflecting her tone to "curious".

Poppins gave her a sidelong glance. "What do you know about her?"

Yet another thing that Herman hated about his nanny: her verbal mind games. On the contrary, Jessica understood this kind of dance. Poppins had just inquired, "What do I know about her that you don't, so I can tell you?"

"She's an anthropomorphic French lop-eared rabbit ," she responded, remembering what she could in her 3-minute encounter with Cheri. "Bambi-like eyes tell me she came from Disney industry or generation but she has three butterflies following her everywhere so she was intentionally drawn, not born. Also, she works as a schoolteacher."

Offering a close-lipped smile, Poppins seemed quite impressed. "How did you know? Was it the light blue cardigan? The pink prairie dress?"

"She has chalk dust on her back." Of course she remembered that. She saw Roger dust off her back while they exited the studios. Ridiculous. He could have just told her so Cheri could have just-

Poppins' laugh interrupted her thoughts. "That's a good one."

The nanny smiled at her as though she's a little girl who answered her riddle correctly. "Alright. Cheri was supposed to play Maid Marian. But the moviemakers thought a fox ending up with a rabbit would be weird. She's supposed to be French but they didn't give her the accent."

The hallway was empty save for the two women. Poppins sat on the bottom of the banisters, sliding upwards without any help. Jessica matched her pace by simply climbing the stairs alongside her.

"Finally, she chose to teach in a school in Toontown," she sniffed again as her feet touched the landing. "The sweet schoolteacher," she gave a pause. "It suits her, I suppose. She has that wholesome appeal."

Jessica's eyes momentarily closed at the word "wholesome."

"She could have been great," Poppins said almost like a retort. Her mouth shut up like a trap and said no more.

Jessica looked ahead but her mind was elsewhere. What Poppins said was all interesting but the question wasn't answered. She finally paid attention to where they're going and saw her car. The two were close to parting ways but Poppins didn't look to be in the mood to talk anymore.

She might as well push her luck. "What else?" she asked casually as they reach her car. Jessica hoped Poppins' answering stare only looked shrewd because of her paranoia. She fished for her keys. It's not like she's asking for that reason.

"Why don't you find out?" she asked back, "She will be back tomorrow anyway."

Author's Notes: I know I've written about Mary Poppins in my other fanfics before. But this time, I did an actual research (from Wiki, unfortunately. So take my research with a grain of salt). Here are the 3 things I've found:

1.) Mary Poppins came from a book.

2.) The author resented how Disney made Mary Poppins sympathetic, stern but sweet.

3.) Book Mary Poppins is a vain, snappish and stern nanny whose only trait that made her lovable is her magic.

Since the author hated the Disney version, I decided to portray more of Book Mary Poppins. In this universe, I'm thinking Mary had let an actress-slash-author write her story in 1934 which will become a movie in 1964.

AND YES, Roger and Jessica in here are still not a couple. For some reason, I like portraying them before they were together. Plus, in Gender Bender AUs, I kept hinting about a guy that broke Rhoda's heart before she and Jesse got together. There was supposed to be a sequel to Across the Alternate where Jessica found out from Rhoda about a guy she used to be crazy about and she's wondering if there was a girl out there that Roger loved first. But it wouldn't make a very big story so I chose not to.

Also, as much as I would love to give Cheri an accent I noticed that Disney characters, no matter their location, don't have accents. They want their mass audience (English speakers) to relate and understand them easily (which is understandable because they only got 90 minutes to tell the story and less than 15 minutes to make the audience love or sympathize with the hero). Lion King for example. How come only Rafiki has an African accent?

Lop-eared rabbits have droopy or "upside-down" ears, in case you don't know.