2-01: An Inconvenient Truth

The Equidistant went dark. Its emergency dimensional borrowers kicked in to keep it from slamming to the ground and ruining its relatively fresh paint job, but the ship was going nowhere. And Dr. Ludlow Squiggle Farnsworthe wasn't a happy camper about it.
"What happened?" he barked. He leaned so heavy on the podium, it whimpered like an overly laden beast of burden—which it exactly what it had turned into at that moment.
A few dozen grad students scrambled over the ship. A rainbow-colored smoke complete with sparkling sprites started to issue from various cracks and openings. It gave off the smell of disappointment and regret and burnt sugar cookies. Eventually, one of the grad students—a lanky, yellow-and-blue-skinned fellow—emerged. He was covered in a soup of color. He pulled the goggles off of his eyes. He opened one of his mouths, and then snapped it shut again.
"Well, out with it!" Farnsworthe bellowed.
"Dead, Doctor," the other mouth finally uttered. The first mouth sneered at the second, but only briefly once it realized it didn't have to be the one to break the news. "Shattered into pieces. There's foam all over engineering."
Ludlow threw up his hands. He spun around and found something heavy enough to cause damage if thrown and then hurled it at the assemblage of students cowering below. "You all fail! You idiots! How could you let this happen?"
"Well, we did tell you that the transfractal ratio was knocking at six and three-tenth gerbils per space opera episode, so technically it was—" The first mouth would have laughed at the audacity of the second had it not been just as utterly vaporized.
Ludlow holstered his ray gun. "Get another," he growled.
The students literally and figuratively tripped over one another as they scrambled to find a replacement—both part and lead grad student.
The tall uniformed figure beside Ludlow clicked its tongue. "Not a very mature response, Doctor. Setbacks happen in technology." His velvet tone dripped with cruelty.
"You see what I have to work with, Admiral," Ludlow gestured at the students. "I'm going to throw them all off the team. The whole lot. Worthless. There's a line of them beating down my office doors just to get a chance to work with me, and every batch of them fails miserably. The state of academics has hit a new low, I tell you."
"You didn't have to vaporize the poor boy, though."
"Ah, he'll get over it. Then I'm going to lock him up in a broom closet and do complex 21-dimensional matrices until he farts his own foam rainbows."
"He wasn't wrong, though. I've never seen a banana slug take more than five gerbils per episode, and I've overseen a lot of technical developments."
"With all due respect, Berthold, I've worked out the matrices myself." He glowered as the students swept up their comrade into a dust bin and deposited him into a little jar labeled "For Reconstitution". "It can be done."
"Theoretically." Admiral Berthold J. Nerf-flippers added.
"I will make it a reality. If there is any being in all the Multiverse who can, it is I and I alone." He struck a dramatic pose.
The Admiral discretely rolled his eyes.
"Boston! Prepare another slug." The Doctor started to descend the ladder from the high concrete platform to the moorings below where the ship hovered. "We need to get this thing up and running before the borrowing runs out of time."
One of the grad students stopped and wrung his tentacles. "We...um... that was the last one, sir. There are no more slugs."
Ludlow hopped to the bottom. "What? How can that be? There were twelve of them. You nincompoops didn't lose them already?"
"And that was the twelfth one that exploded just n—"
The Reconstitution jar was brought out again and filled.
"I expect every one of you imbeciles to have your resignation letters on my desk by morning," he seethed as he took off his pith helmet and started to polish the multiple lenses of the attached goggles.
Admiral Nerf-flippers materialized beside the enraged head of the magi-technical department and hissed in delightful condensation . "I was under the impression that five-dimensional banana slugs were on the highly endangered list. Near extinction. How in the six stable universes did you get your hands on twelve?"
"Those morons at the ministry can't prove anything," came the mumbled response. "I've got my connections."
"Quite risky. You could end up incarcerated unless you deliver."
"You'll get your ship," Ludlow growled and leaned under an open cowling. "Then neither you nor I will have to worry about any damned government."
The Admiral purred and slithered out of the way of the actuators bringing support pads underneath the floating vessel. With a signal the borrowed power cut and the Equidistant settled into place. "You'd better, or you may find yourself in the same state as your ship, Doctor. Dead."