"Hey hardhat!", the Scout yelled. "Sumthin' wrong with the teleporter!"
"Aww hell..." the Engineer muttered. The mission would begin in half an hour. He pulled his wrench out of a belt loop and went to see what the trouble was.
"There's some kinda green sparks comin' off of it!" The Scout was right. The teleporter had shut down when the mission ended, but for some reason it was sparking. Sparking green.
"Darn..." the Engineer trailed off. He'd never seen anything like this before. He smacked the teleporter with his wrench. It had no effect. "Well, I ain't never seen it do somethin' like that. Ah suppose we'd better blow it up, them teleporters are dangerous when they ain't workin' right." He switched on his PDA. The teleporter didn't show up as built. "Huh... I guess somethin' must be jammin' the signal. Must not have heard the warning go off..." He carefully picked up the sparking teleporter. He'd have to examine this after the next round. "Mission begins in ten minutes!", the announcer growled through the speakers.
Thousands of lightyears away, in a completely parallel universe, a scientist pores over a computer printout. He doesn't like what he sees. "Computer!" he yelled. The machine lit up a light to show it was listening. "Emergency situation! Put in a call to the Capitol!"
Commander Dalva squinted at the printout. "I'm going to need a new set of eyes in a few years..." he thought. "Second time this century." Ten thousand years was a long time for an organic life form to still be living. "Dee, can you confirm these reports?" "I can. I'd stake my professional reputation on their validity within negligible tolerances." Dee was the Emperor's foremost scientific adviser. A relatively young AI, his advanced core programming making up for his relative lack of experience and growth. "If these numbers mean what you say they mean, we could have the only credible threat to our security in over a thousand years. Besides the Rouges." Dalva couldn't forget the Rouges. One of the Emperor's first acts of office was to order the deportation or execution of around seventy percent of the planet's population. Needless to say, the deported parties weren't very happy at all. It was one of the few decisions he had made that he had publicly stated as a bad one, though he stood by his own reasoning all the same. "Quite correct, commander. If whoever is controlling this energy is hostile we could have a situation on our hands. And you know how power corrupts..."
"Mission ends in ten seconds! Nine... Eight... Seven... Six..." "Intelligence, comin' through!" "Five... Four... Three... Two..." The Scout slammed the RED intel onto the desk just in time. "One... Victory!" "Whohoohoo! I did it!" "Job well done!" the Engineer said, stepping out from behind his sentry gun. He headed to the nearest resupply and through the door to the base's hidden non-combat sections. The strangely sparking teleporter was still on his workbench. The sparking had grown in intensity while the fighting was going on. Engineer grabbed a screwdriver off of a toolbox and hooked up a grounding strap to his mechanical hand. He held the screwdriver near the sparking teleporter. The green sparks didn't arc to the screwdriver as he expected, but continued sparking into the ground. "Must not be real electricity then... bein' green and all..."
*KZRRRRRRNNGGG*
"What the hell!"