this is a dialogue from my WIP furry comic “Avery-Were” that’s somewhere on one of my distant back-burners but i think about it every time i hear about a character who is “immune to magic”
“So, does being from a non-magical universe make me special here? Immune? Like, if I can’t do magic, then I also can’t be hurt by it?”
“Ha. No. And you wouldn’t want it that way. Trust me.”
“What? What d'you mean?”
“In my hometown, once, there was a child born cursed. His curse was being immune to magic. Unaffected by it. The curse came on as he grew. Got stronger and stronger…”
“…okay?”
“When he was five years old, magic barely did anything. Hurricanes sent by wind-magic couldn’t blow him over. Boulders thrown with earth-magic passed through him. A magical plague caused a famine, he still had food to eat. Food that was intangible to everyone else.”
“Whoa, damn. That’s–”
“But it went for everything, see? The farmers used magic to grow food to end the famine. That food was intangible to him. His mother once used a spell to kill a bat-fly that was chasing him. It still kept chasing, biting him. Like a ghost she couldn’t touch.”
“…yikes.”
“All of us children, we tried to play with him. But some children were born because of magic. Their parents met because of magic. Or could only conceive through magical means. Those children he couldn’t play with. They didn’t exist for him, you see. Oh, and sometimes some of us got sick and a magic healer saved their lives. And then, those ones were lost to him too.”
“Oh. Shit.”
“Because he was fading, see.”
“Fading…?”
“Magic affected him less and less. And affected more and more things around him. So he was fading away. After a while it couldn’t even affect him indirectly. Not even by causing things that affected him many steps later.”
“So, like, he couldn’t even interact with anything that existed because of magic.”
“And nearly everything does, of course. So he faded more and more as the curse got stronger. He stopped talking to us. Started talking to people we couldn’t see. Eventually he was just– gone.”
“Geez. …Do you think he’s still alive, in some non-magical universe somewhere?”
“His parents liked to hope so. But no. I think he just became too immune to magic. So much that he couldn’t even coexist with it. Not even with magic things that happened in the distant past.”
“Oh. Yeah… there’s been magic here forever, right? I guess if you look far enough back in the chain of events, all your existences were kinda caused by magic, at some point along the line.”
“And his curse reached far enough to touch that point. And so he stopped existing.”