So I poked at an AU for some OCs, as you do. And the setting this time was Downtrodden. And long story short, I accidentally some rabbit gods. Maybe.
Zeimah is a hybrid (like she always is). Three-quarters bun, still mainlander enough that it shows. She's the god of traveling and exploring; she embodies the feeling of wanting to know what's past the furthest edges of the territory you've grown up in, of waking up to spring thaw and needing to be anywhere else besides a warren that you know too well and that's full of people who are related to you. The feeling of wanting to see new places - not even places no one's seen before, just places new to you. Traveling has two parts, though - the part where you go out, and the part where you come home. So she's also the god of coming home, of the feeling of being able to come home and tell about your adventures, of having a home to come back to. Whatever name she's got, as a deity, once people actually notice that she's a god and not just an absurdly lucky traveler who can't stay put for more than a winter, it translates from Old Lango to "dust" - specifically, the dust that clings to your feet when you walk the summer roads when everyone's waiting for the rain.
Pritra is the god who embodies the feeling of snuggling in bed with your mate after sex, or after a long day. The feeling of holding your kit in your arms and being awestruck by this tiny living thing, and being amazed at how fiercely protective you feel. The feeling of joy and pride, at seeing living things grow and learn. The feeling of being willing to punch someone in the throat, if they try and come at your family. The feeling of being completely done with these idiots, but they're still your idiots and you love them anyways. As a deity, his name probably translates from the Old Lango word for "hearth".
And Basil isn't even my OC, but he's in this setting anyway with these other two dorks. He's the god of survivor's math. Of talking so that there won't be a fight. He embodies the feeling of "this sucks, but it's better than dying" and of enduring bad times to make it through to the other end alive (if not whole). The god of "calm your fucking shit" and "this sucks and I am Done with it sucking". (He is not the God of Fucking Doing Something About The Problem. That is very much someone else. His methods are quieter and more averse to the use of violence. They probably get along well, though.) He embodies the calculus that drives rabbits to eat Poisonous Bastard, knowing the short-term misery that it will bring them and deciding the long-term benefits outweigh that - and the calculus that goes "I might die of stress from planning Mending, but making sure the warren is fully stocked to survive the winter will be worth it even if I do" and the one that leads good parents to look at the pantry during a bad harvest, figure out what the bare minimum an adult rabbit needs to survive, and making sure that even if the soup is thinner than anyone likes, the kids still aren't going to bed hungry if it can be avoided. He's the god of knowing death happens (because every rabbit knows this), but planning like you'll live to see tomorrow so that you will see tomorrow. I have no idea what he'd be called, as a deity, but it probably roughly translates out to "I LIVED, BITCH". 'Spite', maybe.
This particular AU starts with Zeimah having a recurring dream that pairs with an increasing compulsion to travel to the island and go as far inland as she can get. Basil is dragged (mostly willingly) along with her, because his family is hot garbage and there's a reason why he embodies the specific things he does if he ends up a god. (Namely: his family is hot garbage and a bag of dicks. They are garbage dicks.) Pree is met once they arrive at the island, and is a midwife who's been living at an Orchid warren that's the first stopping point for most people just getting back to the island (because travel is stressful, best to destress before you do more of it). Pree helps these two dorks adapt to the island, and cope with the sudden emergence of their powers (because of course they're late bloomers). Coping mostly means dragging them to the nearest Life college and dunking them into courses on necromancy and being a priest, and also making sure they actually have a proper education on sex ed. He's a midwife, not a saint. Zeimah's compulsion to keep traveling inland complicates things, since 1) she get jittery if she has to stay in one place for too long, moving to anxious as time goes on, 2) things get increasingly dangerous the further inland you go, and 3) the downside she got from hybrid heritage is inheriting her mom's deeply shitty legs. They're better than her mom's were, at least (her mom could barely walk by the time puberty happened), but early-onset wear-and-tear arthritis is still a bitch to deal with if you're planning on doing a lot of walking and/or may need to run for your life with little or no warning. She eventually has to get mobility aids, and is seriously considering just straight-up replacing her legs with proesthetics from the knee down. (Rabbit medicine is good - way better than mainlander stuff - but I figure they're probably not quite to the point where joint replacement surgery is easy, common, or even generally considered as a reasonable option.)
If she does end up as a god, one of the first miracles people are likely to look back at and go "y'know, that should have been a sign" is that she's probably going to go for prosthetic legs, and save her original legs to turn the bones into more natural-feeling prosthetics. She's a necromancer, and mages are a dime a dozen for rabbits, so it's not being able to enchant a pile of bones (and yarn and leather) into being a set of working prosthetics that's the surprising bit. The surprising bit is where it doesn't go terribly wrong, even a little bit. They behave just like normal legs should. Which isn't a given, for enchanted prosthetics. It's more likely that it'd be viewed as her being an absurdly lucky idiot for a very long time, though. (And probably even afterwards, because it's one of those things that wouldn't reliably work for someone who can't just sort of clip through the laws of reality.)
