Lizardverse

Contrary to popular belief, the Lizardverse would be comprised primarily of lizards. That doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense, as both lizards in series were turned into lizards by the same girl using hexes. Rather it takes place in a bunch of dome covered cities surrounded by a desert which encompasses the entire rest of the known world. The cities are few in number and generally are focused toward a specific purpose, like manufacturing, academia, and military. Technology is a bit scattered in terms of how advanced it is, but relying on magical energy as a fuel source eliminates the need for fuel based on resources like oil or even solar power, and it’s generally somewhat more advanced than modern tech. Magic and technology are not considered mutually exclusive, but using magic is generally just considered preferable for most things.

While magic is fairly common, it does take a significant amount of time and dedication to advance it beyond an initial small set of innate abilities a person will start to figure out around the time they’re 10-12. Some people are actually content with those abilities and choose to work with them alone, but if they want to branch out into the far broader potential to use magic they have to put significant work into using new kinds of abilities. Even those that go to college and specifically go into magic-related fields tend to just learn a couple new types of magic on top of their base variety to augment it. This is what makes Lizard/Cyluth so notable, he just can learn new pathways into different branches of magic very casually. Even most experienced mages can’t just learn new types of magic on the fly, especially not through observation.

With all that said, yes, more specialized mages with huge amounts of experience with their powers can absolutely still make their way up in terms of having impressive magic.  A man whose only power is to make things explode might still be a reasonable opponent for Lizard if he’s dedicated the time and energy into refining said explosions, or he could make a solid living as a miner. Someone who manifests a very obscure and useful power, such as the ability to stop time for brief periods, would possibly do better just focusing on it than branching out anyway. Most likely the majority of characters in the series would have more focused power sets and still be able to compete than the ones demonstrated in MYM for this reason, especially given Lizard would, while still being very talented, not be portrayed as being as insanely powerful as the moveset does.

Iguana/Schwarzen and Liz Eird would both definitely exist within canon, though I would probably have to modify Liz’s backstory to a degree. Magic Harvard is not a real place in this universe, as funny as that would be, but she makes sense to have still exist as the more sympathetic protagonist given I actually really enjoy Kat’s very egotistical persona for Lizard. Iguana meanwhile is responsible for more or less the entire modernization of society as well as the expansion of magic education and understanding of how to develop powers. He has a similar gift to Lizard with magic, but being about 30 years older is vastly more powerful and is the one character in the series who can genuinely beat highly trained and specialized magic users at their own game. A note worth mentioning is while he’s given a lot to society by the nature of what he’s done, it’s all really been with the end goal of proving how awesome he is. It’s frankly cemented his completely ridiculous ego and because he’s done so much he believes the people owe him to make him their new god. While Lizard would have similar ego issues to him, the main difference between the two is that Lizard actually has a proper moral code at the end of the day.

For the record continuing on Iguana, unlike Lizard he’s ever bit as powerful as the moveset suggests, if not moreso. Unlike Lizard whose original specialization before exploring his talents would be flight, Iguana’s initial specialization would be creating moving constructs, giving him a massive army of things like the golems and stone dragons in the moveset. He would even be able to create homunculi, beings that actually develop their own sentience, but he usually prefers not to do that mostly on the basis that making golems is so much more efficient. There is likely at least one homunculus among his allies/servants, however.

For the record, while humans would be the majority of living people in the series, regular humans probably would not get nearly as much focus as those with considerable abnormalities. Homunculi exist made those other than those made by Iguana, usually by dedicated creators, and as you might expect of created constructs they’re not terribly well off. There’s also rare cases where golems that are used for a very long time actually begin to develop intelligence as well, and those would probably be covered as well. In addition to that, hexes would definitely be a thing and some people would be afflicted with them, some just getting one strange feature like Liz Eird, while others would turn outright monstrous.

Before we can go any further, we have to discuss why the cities are walled in. To put it simply, the desert is hell on earth. When magic was discovered, it awoke many colonies of magical beings that lived under the earth and in far corners. While they’re not inherently destructive, the fact that they all got up at once due to what the humans were doing ended up sparking a massive conflict that left the world in shambles. The humans lucked out; they discovered a portal to another universe with gods that liked them. They pitched into creating cities to keep humans relatively safe from the conflict outside… which was very beneficial to them for one particular reason. While most kinds of beings used magic that could be understood, there was a single particular type of magical being that strikes absolute terror into humans, djinns. They utilize hexes, which are a kind of magic that creates afflictions that human magical sciences have never been able to understand or explain.

Now the cities are settled in barriers, mostly to specifically not deal with djinns as they have no idea how to protect themselves from the malevolent ones. Of which there are quite a few, with one in particular showing up in the later parts of the story to serve as a rival main antagonist to Iguana. Even with the domes up, it’s not like their influence can’t be felt too, with those that travel outside sometimes bringing back hexes which can either turn that individual into a huge threat, spread like a plague to cause all sorts of unfortunate afflictions that have to be quarantined, or just ruin that one person’s life. For the record, I don’t like making my non-human species be all malevolent so there have definitely been rare instances of djinns actually helping people… but that’s not often acknowledged due to the fear they generally inspire.

Djinns aren’t the only reason nobody really goes into the desert. The sheer outpouring of magic has made the landscape chaotic, full of exotic dangers and constantly changing so that a map of it doesn’t really exist. Stabilizations have been made around the cities and routes between them to make that at least consistent, but journeying outside is not to be taken lightly. There also are other magical beings besides djinns out there, which can go decently well for those who leave the city, but you better believe some of them view humans the way humans view djinns.

Most likely the story would start early on with Lizard getting forcibly transformed into his lizard state in the early chapters, and up until the actual encounter with Iguana would be largely trying to deal with his new form, running into one shot antagonists because I love me some one shot antagonists, and gradually uncovering the conspiracy Iguana’s set up. Liz Eird would probably have some role as a secondary protagonist and there’d be 1-2 other party members who would join. One would be a homunculus and if there were another it’d be another hexed person trying to escape quarantine or something. Halfway through, Iguana would become the main villain, kill Liz(possibly temporarily) and at that point the only place Lizard would have to go is the desert. The remainder of the story would take place out there to make for a much more fantastical setting than the city used for the first part.

I did mention a multiverse in Iguana’s description and there are portals to other universes that have been made. The only especially prominent one is the one to the universe where a bunch of gods came in to help them fight of the djinn. That was a favor that mankind very much appreciated, but recently that realm had to be cut off within Iguana’s lifetime. Something showed up in that realm and started killing and replacing gods, and any military forces sent in to try and salvage that situation were casually wiped out. While Iguana plans to rule the multiverse, which is the one place he intends to leave to itself, as the being that caused that event is the only thing that truly inspires fear in him. Other universes have been sought out as places to expand to that don’t feature djinns and chaotic, desolate land, though as it turns out branching into other universes is pretty hard and most expeditions have not came up with as much progress as they’d hoped for yet.