Totems, Totems, Totems!

Question: In a previous post, you said that after Protean Understanding is achieved by a god, their Scions only get their main animal? But what about people who have already purchased multiple animals? Say they have one or two dots in other animals - do those become associated as well? Also, how do you mechanically reconcile Protean Understanding with multiple animal purchases, which are rendered rather redundant and a waste of a purchase upon attainment of this boon?

At the moment, none of our PCs are Legend 11, so nobody has the option to pick up Protean Understanding yet. However, there are a few suggestions on the Scion: God book about how to handle it when they do, and we're probably going to co-opt one of them (unless John's changed his mind since we last discussed it, in which case I'm sure he'll correct me any minute): when they get Protean Understanding, they'll get the XP they spent on other Animal trees back as if they'd never spent it, and be free to dump it somewhere else if they want to. Protean Understanding makes separate iterations of the Animal purview redundant, so they won't be required to have them anymore; they'll just vanish into the aether and there will suddenly be a lot more room on their character sheets.

However, they're still only going to be passing one Animal association down to their Scions; just like Tezcatlipoca's kids only get Jaguar associated even though he probably has Protean Understanding himself, a Scion will only be handing down the animal totem he's most closely tied to (that is, the one that got high enough that he could buy Protean Understanding). If a Scion wants to pass down a second animal to his kids, we would require that he be related to it in some way - that is, we don't care if Protean Understanding lets you play with parakeets, if you have never had anything to do with parakeets it is not going to make you Associated with them. If he is legitimately related to that animal in a meaningful way, he can just buy The Beast a second time to add a second association to the possibilities for his kids. Most PCs probably won't bother - it'd be quite an XP sink - but the option is there for those that want to join the ranks of the select few gods that are rocking out more than one Animal association.

And no, having level 1 or 2 in an Animal will not make it become instantly associated along with whatever you had at level 9 before you bought Protean Understanding. That animal's obviously not particularly associated with you, or you'd be doing more with it. Your kids will still have to suffer under the cruel lash of the one XP per level difference if they want to pick that animal up.