The next morning arrives, and my birthday is officially in the past. I'm officially 10. I’m a grownup, woo! This would probably be more exciting if I hadn’t been a grownup once before, but honestly, it’s still pretty exciting. I can leave the village on my own now. Not that it would be safe to do so, but I can. I can buy or sell or trade things autonomously, without having to worry about being overruled, I can possess things that will actually belong to me, and so on.

I haven't been gifted anything to be able to trade or sell, and I’ll end up needing to build my own hut if I want any sort of privacy: Until and unless I make my own home, I’ll be expected to stay on the floor in a shared hut with my parents and my older siblings (distinct from clutch mates.) At most, I might have a reed divider to work with, probably not even that, and I will have about as much space to myself as it takes to lay prone.

Since we’re community raised, I don’t have much of a relationship with any of my actual family. Once it became clear that I would be extremely weak, there has always been a sense of distance and discomfort engaging any of them. They are family and will provide the bare minimum amount of sort required to meet their societal expectations, but those expectations are slim in the first place, and for a weakling those expectations basically end with ensuring that there is a floor to sleep on. Aside from that, I do not expect any meaningful contributions on their side towards my own success.

My earth family was much better. They didn't have money to pay my way through college or anything, really their physical support was limited to inexpensive meals and a cockroach ridden house, but for the most part they were very emotionally supportive, and would at least be glad to see me rather than acting like I was some sort of blemish on the world.

So Elliot, what was that earlier when you talked about Krielziss giving Roark her first hatching rites? Yeah, that’s kind of a weird cultural quirk. It’s traditional for any female lizardfolks to offer their first hatching rites to the strongest lizardfolk male in either their own clutch, or the one directly behind them. And yes, hatching rites do involve mating. That should have been obvious that nothing need be said.

Aside from that first offering of hatching rights though, it’s common for many lizardfolk women to choose a single partner that they stay with for an extended period of time. Sometimes even for life, though as brutal as lizardfolks lives are, it’s relatively common even for the women that mate for life to end up with two or three different mates over the course of their lives.

It’s also very common for female lizard folk to pursue strength in their hatching partner. A tribal leader for instance will often have half a dozen or more hatching partners, and most nobles will have 2 or 3 women who dedicate themselves to them in the hopes that their finer qualities will be passed along to their children. People like myself, who are even weaker than the average human? I won’t say it’s impossible for me to ever end up in a situation where a female lizardfolk will offer me hatching rites, especially if I were to succeed in another area like becoming a strong shaman, but probably around half of all male lizardfolk never once end up with hatching rights. For obvious reasons, my personal outlook is pretty bad in that regard.

Honestly, I’m pretty ok with my situation though. I’ve gotten used to the lizardfolk aesthetic, and I’ve even learned to appreciate aspects of it, but I still have enough of my human sensibilities that I’ve never felt much interest in exploring what lizardfolk women would have to offer. It might be a very different experience, who knows maybe I would even like it, but the interest just isn't there for me.

I guess I should probably cover the whole “male/female role” thing since we’re on the topic of women. There’s not much to cover. Outside of granting hatching rights, which is something that in theory only the females have the ability to dictate, there really isn’t a structural gendered role differentiation, it’s all about strength. Mostly of the physical sort, where big muscles means better treatment.

Shamans are something of a special case, where they are recognized as being strong even if they are weak, but they aren’t really allowed any sort of a leadership role either. They are advisors to the nobility and the chieftain, but to actually be a noble or chieftain, they would need to be able to win as well as defend against leadership challenges. Which means they would need to engage in one on one fights. Starting in melee.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

So, shamans are not leaders, they are advisors. Of course, this focus on physical strength creates its own discrepancy since, on the whole, the females tend to be a little shorter and a little less beefy with one or two other "soft" attributes offsetting the difference, in other words the women tend to have slightly higher Intelligence and/or Wisdom attributes rather than being quite as purely strength focused, although I've never seen any explicit pressure encouraging that trend.

I did ask Krielziss at one point, and her explanation was that she went with a few points in wisdom so that she'd do a better job of picking mates. Again, I haven't seen anything indicating actual pressure to encourage that, but maybe there is and it just hasn't happened in front of me. Those few points difference in physical strength and its impact on combat ability can be made up for via skill, though, and that returns to the lack of role differentiation. Male or female, if you win and defend your title, you are treated accordingly. Their hierarchy is as surprisingly flexible as it is stupid.

Our chieftain as well as a majority of nobles are males, but several of the current villages have a female noble or two, and according to our verbal histories, the stone tails have actually had 2 female chiefess's. Yes they died young, but most of the chieftain’s die young, so their early demise doesn't say much as a mark against their capabilities.

That doesn't change the inherent flaws of a leadership structure being determined by how good you are at stabbing people, but it was nonetheless a bit surprising that this backwards world and culture didn't have an explicit prejudice against having women in positions of authority.

Enough about society though, it’s time to move on to my day and what I’m doing with it. Care to take a guess? Yep, you nailed it. I’m going to be visiting the friendly neighborhood slaves. I don’t call them by name. I don’t know their name, they are known as mage and priest, respectively. That’s the value they add to the village, so that is their identity. They’re punished if they show any individuality… Which is a bit tricky considering they are the only humans in the village.

Whatever their names are, they learned better than to try and use them before the first time I got to speak with them. First, I visit Fork, and I convince him to let me borrow a scroll of light and another of resistance. Second, I visit the lowest ranking shaman in the village, and I borrow some magic scrolls from him as well. Borrow, mind you.

Crafting scrolls, even of low-level spells like this, is extremely expensive. It takes more than just time. The shaman scrolls, for instance require, specially prepared tree bark harvested at the right time of night, ink made by a particular breed of octopus, and more. These things are extremely expensive to purchase or produce, and if I didn’t have a perfect track record of returning everything I borrowed when I said I would return it, and in pristine condition, I would’ve been cut off long ago. After acquiring scrolls, I meander over to where the slaves are tending the garden and bring them inside.

I know what I want to try, and I have ever since I got my hypotheses ironed out, the difficulty has been in execution. I’ve been looking for a method by which I could become an appropriate medium for all of the classes at the same time, but so far I haven’t had any brilliant ideas nor has attempting to conceptualize this super class resulted in a new option.

So, today I’m going to try and see if something else can work using a similar baseline for evaluation. I have the mage bring out a scroll of resistance, another of light, and another of mending. After that, I have the priest provide gospels of the same spells. They may be slaves, and scrolls may be expensive, and lizardfolk may be dumb, but there’s not a person in this world that fails to recognize the value that magic users bring to the table, nor the value that the magical items they create can bring. The materials the slaves access might be closely monitored, but when we have spare materials, we’re quick to let them be converted into disposable spells.

Mending isn’t universal, but somehow the gospel and the scrolls result in an identical effect despite looking very different to my non initiated eyes. The scrolls and gospels of resistance and light? As far as I’m aware, those spells are truly universal. There might be some classes that use magic but which can’t cast them, but I don’t know enough about the world to know what class might have magic but not those spells.

I long ago tapped the knowledge of every magic user I knew to create a list of spells which all of the branches of magic I was aware of would share, though, and even though asking favors from Fork is no small feat for someone as unimportant as I am, I did get to spend some time learning from him, and he has not forgotten me, so I included druids in that check as well.

Comparing these three spells across four different power sources and release methods, once again, they look very different. Not only is the gospel very different from the scrolls, but the scrolls are also wildly different from each other. Finally, I have the priest and the cleric cast those spells one after another, and carefully record a phonetic approximation of their voices during the spell, as well as what gestures they make.

I’m not yet sure of the reason, but although the gestures and sounds vary greatly between disciplines, the material components, the phosphorescent moss or firefly for light for example, are identical. It’s not just the shaman who can use a firefly to cast the light spell, so can the mage and the priest, and similarly all of them can use phosphorescent moss as a substitute. I’m not quite there yet, but I know that must be a key piece of information. And thus, like I have so many times before, I begin to study.

I’m looking for the patterns that I’m convinced must be there, even if I’m magically blocked from being able to comprehend what’s in front of my mind. Its close. Wait a second, I think I might have found what I was looking for!