Not to put too fine of a point on it; lizardfolk are dumb. They are smarter than any animal I’d heard of on earth, but they’re still notably below human level intellect. Before you push back on that claim by bringing up elephants or something, look, intelligence to the best of our ability to determine is based on a combination of brain size and neural density. Elephants have larger brains than humans, but they fall well short in terms of neural density. The claim that elephants are as smart as humans, much like the claim that dolphins are as smart as humans, simply is not true. They are remarkably intelligent, but they fall short of human level unless you’re comparing them against humans that aren’t developed: I.e. immature brains which haven’t yet finished developing the entirety of their prodigious intellect yet. Sort of like the lizard folk that I now am.

If I had to guess, the average adult Lizardfolk is probably in the same mental ballpark as an average 13-year-old human. A 13-year-old human that is also completely lacking in something resembling a proper formal education. Lizardfolk are capable of reason, they are capable of quite a lot really, but they are also painfully limited. They are limited by their mental faculties, by their exposure to information, and even by their ability to apply reason over an emotional outpouring.

Even for the likes of the shamans, and with the advantages that the presence of classes and a weird system that everyone can avail themselves of to at least some degree provides, while they may have accrued some wisdom and are able to more fully contain their own emotional outbursts, they are not very smart compared to a human at the same point in the population bell curve. Lizardfolk seem to be born with some exceptional physical attributes, but it appears the physical perks of being a lizardfolk truly are offset by mental penalties associated with our race. This is why I said that I think talent I think is a bit of a doozy. To be completely blunt, that is probably the single biggest reason amongst a laundry list of reasons why the lizardfolk aren’t more successful.

So back to my unique circumstances. My mental stats are far beyond the average lizardfolk, mostly due to having made an active effort to prioritize mental attributes since I was a mere hatchling. And now, after having spent a couple years establishing a preliminary foundation and reputation for information retention and general competence among the shamans, despite being underage and classless, I was able to convince them and through them the chief that it might be worth trying to see if a human priest or mage could make a better tutor for me.

The lizardfolk aren’t exactly fans of humans. Or mages. Or priests. But after convincing the Chief to give the order it was only a matter of time until operation "hire a tutor" was a success. We got lucky and a low-level group of adventurers stumbled into the swamp not 2 months after I got the chief to agree to try and take prisoners, and instead of getting one human spellcaster to learn from, I got 2, one each between a priest and a mage! These two humans are without a doubt the biggest reason I know as much as I do humans, their classes, and the rest of the world more broadly. I'm still ignorant in many ways, they aren't terribly enthusiastic teachers, but they've been able to fill in blanks I never would have thought to ask about, as well as to help cement a few suspicions I've had.

It took only three months for the priests proselytizing to trigger the class join notification, and another year after that for the mage option to trigger courtesy of the grudging tutelage of the reluctant mage. Yay! By this point I had a plethora of class options and a foundational level of knowledge relating to several classes: Lizardfolk Warrior, Lizardfolk Shaman, Druid, Priest, and Mage. But… I’d noticed something. Something that I wanted to pursue. Whether we were looking at a shaman’s magic, or a druids, or a priests, or even a mages, I hypothesized that they were all wrong, or perhaps that they were all right, but only to a comparable extent. Essentially, I came to speculate that the spell casting classes were incomplete.

The priest claimed that his and all other priestly magic was divine in nature. According to him, their spells are granted by the gods that they worship. Although most priests share access to most spells at the same levels, worshipping different deities makes small adjustments to which spells a priest can use and sometimes at what level they could be used at, so there likely is some truth to priestly magic being a matter of divine providence.

Most of the shamans claimed that they would harness the power of their ancestors and their spirit animals to cast their spells. Fork, the high shaman who taught me the basics of what druidic magic was, claimed that his source of Druidic power was that of nature itself. The captive mage claimed that he harnessed the mana ambient to the environment which he would then channel through prepared templates he had previously imbued with his own mental power, and which would combine to result in the environmental mana assuming the properties dictated by the mental framework he’d prepared.

Although these were all clearly different concepts, and even though without an appropriate class I could not personally comprehend the magic imbued in a single one of the scrolls that the mage would occasionally prepare, or understand a single one of the gospels that the priest would proudly present, after having spent years studying these various magical styles to the best of my ability without actually having a class to draw practical experience from, I couldn’t help but feel that there was a pattern at work.

Every type of magic I had been exposed to seemed to me to follow a similar process. There would be a source of magic: Mana, divine power, whatever. There would also be a framework, or focus. The priest would beg their god for the inspiration that would serve as their framework, the mage would craft their own through intensive research and imbue it with their own mana and will, the shamans would draw on the knowledge of their ancestors as their focus, and so on. And then based on the framework, the magic would be called upon and released at the will of the magic user via a series of motions, sounds, and materials.

If you learned to cast spells in one way, you could not cast spells from another field without taking levels in an appropriate class, after which you would be limited to your skill level in that class. So for instance if you were a level 2 mage, you would be able to throw an arcane missile to harm someone, and if you were a level 2 priest, you could apply diving healing to an injury, resulting in healing so death defying that it wouldn’t so much as leave a scar. But while a priest and a shaman and a druid could all heal, a mage could not. While a druid could cause plant life in a large area to rise and bind those within that area with leaves, vines and roots, a priest could not. While the mage could manifest pure arcane energy into a bolt that would unerringly strike a target, none of the others, priest shaman or druid, could replicate that feat. But if, upon reaching level 2, the mage were to choose to make his second level that of a priest instead of repeating his level as a mage? He would not see any improvement in his arcane spellcasting, but he would then assume the ability to heal equally well compared to a level 1 priest.

This led me to a few tentative hypotheses. First, that “magic source à magic focus à release” was incomplete. There is an additional limitation which restricts each version of spell caster to only their respective form of casting. For my second hypotheses, the existence of magical items, some of which are restricted by class but most of which are not, led me to make a tentative conclusion on the troublesome element.

I conjectured that the limitation was the medium. In other words, the basic of casting a spell is not “magic source à magic focus à release” but is instead “magic source à magic focus à medium à release”. For my third hypothesis, I conjectured that taking a class allowed you to be the medium through which the magic would come to life, but that you would subsequently be subject to the restrictions of that class.

At its core, a hypothesis is nothing more than a guess, and my hypotheses up to this point had not led me to unlock anything new or unique… And I am about to turn 10, after which point I will be expected to have picked my class and be able to care for myself properly from that time on. I might not have to have my class picked on that very day, but it needs to be soon.