Manton Effect

The Manton effect refers to the inability of most powers to affect a living thing. Powers that only affect living things appear to be exempt. This effect prevents telekinetics from crushing someone's heart inside their chest or force field users from bisecting a person. Those capes who are not bound by the effect are considered some of the strongest in the world. Narwhal, with her ability to create forcefields inside people, is one such individual.

It is unknown why the Manton effect exists or how to bypass it, but bypassing it is often linked to a second trigger event. Faultline surmises that the rule might be a mental block set in place when an individual gets their powers, protecting them from hurting themselves with their abilities, which is overgeneralized to include all living things rather than just the user. Her attempts to retrain and circumvent this mental block prove futile.

Examples

• Vista has the ability to stretch and compress space, but this becomes a great deal slower and requires more effort when the space she is working with is occupied by people, and she is unable to stretch, distort or compress a living individual. The author notes in the comments of Interlude 5 that this is due to Vista's ability involving a great many small, interconnected events through the space she's affecting, and the Manton effect prevents said effects from occuring inside people, forcing her to work around them.
• Bakuda, by contrast, researched Vista's powers and found a way to create a controlled distortion of flesh, and specifically references the Manton effect when explaining this.
• Faultline can cut through objects with a touch, but can't cut through living things.
• Telekinetics such as Rune cannot lift people. Though they might lift a person by their costume or clothing. Similarly, a pyrokinetic could not set a person themselves on fire, but they could create a flame that they then throw at someone or place in close proximity to them, that then burns them.