A: If your Transporter is Malfunctioning, no, it will not get you all the Crew in play. You will get the same effect from Beam Us Up as if you had no Transporter.
(Note that in Star Fluxx, it’s called a Teleporter, and the Keepers which are Beamed Up are Beings, not Crew, but this question could still arise if Beam Us Up is played with a Malfunctioning Teleporter)
A: To review, if someone plays the Action Beam Us Up, if a player has the Teleporter in play the person with the Teleporter takes ALL Being Keepers into their hand. Since this is someone else taking your Keepers, you can counter that Action with It’s a Trap. This would cancel the playing of Beam Us Up (saving everyone’s Keepers).
It’s pretty clear what’s going on when the person playing Beam Us Up is the person who has the Teleporter: they’ve triggered the action, and they’re the one stealing your Keepers. It’s a Trap takes one of their Keepers. But what if the person who played Beam Us Up is NOT the person who has the Teleporter? It could happen! Maybe they were forced to play it because of Play All, or they didn’t have any being Keepers to lose, so they didn’t care. In that case, who do you get to steal from when you play It’s a Trap?
After some deliberation, Andy and I played it out, looked at the exact wording on all of the cards involved, and ruled that It’s a Trap targets the person who is stealing your Keepers, i.e. the person who is receiving them, regardless of whether they triggered the action or not. So you’d steal a Keeper from the person with the Teleporter.
This more complicated scenario looks like this:
Player A has the Teleporter in play
Player B plays Beam Us Up
Player C, who has Keepers which would be taken by A in this scenario, plays the Surprise It’s a Trap out of turn to cancel B’s Action Beam Us Up, and steal a Keeper from Player A, the person with the Teleporter.
A: You cannot teleport the Teleport Chamber itself. We should probably word the card just a tad bit clearer to specify any other Keeper.
Note that the Transporter in Star Trek Fluxxen has a different function than the Teleporter in Star Fluxx, however. Rather than moving a Keeper from one player to another on the table, it takes any Keeper on the table up into the hand of the player who has the Transporter. Again, you can’t use the Transporter to transport itself up to your hand. We’re not sure why you’d want to, but we thought we’d answer that just in case.
Now, if you’re mixing more than one Star Trek deck, there will be many Transporters in the deck, and it’s quite possible that someone might want to use one Transporter to suck up another Transporter to their hand to take it away from someone else. Unfortunately, we’re going to have to rule that out on the basis that it would definitely cause some sort of terrible Transporter-related disaster, probably involving stray tachyons or chroniton particles.
A: Not so much. From the person who has the Expendable Crewman, they’d first have to take the Expendable Crewman, clearly, but since they get ALL Beings, they don’t stop there — they take any other Beings that person has in play as well. So really, the Expendable Crewman can only protect you when a single card is being taken. It provides a buffer… but that buffer is only one card deep, as it were.
A: If you are using the Teleporter in Star Fluxx, then yes. Whatever Creeper or Creepers are attached to the Keeper teleported will move as well. That’s one of the ways you can get rid of Creepers in front of you: to teleport the Keeper they’re attached to to some other player.
Note that the Transporter in Star Trek Fluxxen has a different function, however. Rather than moving a Keeper from one player to another on the table, it takes any Keeper on the table up into the hand of the player who has the Transporter. In those cases, it’s more like a repeatable, personal Beam-Us-Up-with-Transporter. In those cases, think of it this way: both cards get sucked up into the hand of the person with the Transporter, and then the Creeper, which can’t be held in your hand, goes back onto the table in front of the person who took the Keeper.
A: You may notice that Attaching Creepers are usually something which modifies the qualities of the Keeper itself. The idea is that they become as inseparable as one object. You don’t have a Doctor and a Brain Parasite, you have a Sick Doctor; you don’t have a Poet and Insanity and Metamorphosis, you have an Insane Mutated Poet; you don’t have a Holodeck and a Malfunction, you have a Malfunctioning Holodeck; you don’t have a Bacteria and Liver and Heart and Thyroid, you have one giant Liver-Heart-Thyroid Infection (yipes!); you don’t have Spock and the Mirror Universe, you have Mirror Universe Spock, and so on, and so on…
That’s the whole point of the “stays together until discarded” wording. Anything that you could do to the Keeper will also happen to the Creeper which is attached to it, and vice versa. In Star Fluxx, when you use the Laser Sword or Laser Pistol to attack a Keeper with a Creeper attached, you are attacking the afflicted Keeper, and the whole point is that it’s a way to get rid of the Creeper.
In the Star Trek Fluxxes, the Phaser is similar, but the language states that you are targeting the Creeper (because the Trek Fluxxes include non-attaching Creepers as well, it makes the Phaser more useful against ALL Creepers, not just attaching ones). When you destroy the Creeper, then if it is attached to a Keeper, the Keeper will be destroyed too (it’s not possible to shoot just the Mirror Universe aspect of Mirror Universe Spock, you have to shoot the dude as a whole…)
You can Trash a Keeper, Exchange Keepers, or discard it because of a Keeper Limit. All totally valid ways to rid yourself of annoying attached Creepers! (If you Trash Something to discard the Creeper, the Keeper it’s attached to will also be trashed, of course.)
You can even Recycle it (bonus!) and the attached Creeper will go into the discard pile with the Keeper. “Oh, this thing is messed up and useless to me now. In fact, it’s a hindrance!… I don’t want it anymore. But hey! At least I can recycle it!”
In fact, if you’re trying to acquire a certain Creeper to meet a Goal, you can Steal a Keeper (or Steal Something), and you’ll get the whole Keeper/Creeper combo. see: If a Goal requires a Keeper and Attaching Creeper…
Your Hologram or Holodeck is not duplicating just a Robot, it’s duplicating an Evil Robot… for better or for worse, as the case may be! see: If the Holographic Projector/Holodeck is used to imitate a Keeper with a Creeper attached…
There are some exceptions, and they’re usually very explicitly worded to let you know they are exceptions. see: …Are there exceptions to this rule?
Or they follow directly from qualities of the Creeper (i.e. things which would take the Keeper up into someone’s hand, but it has a Creeper attached, will result in the Creeper being “spat out” in front of the person who took the combo up into their hand.
see: If someone plays Beam Us Up, and one player had a being/crew member with a Creeper attached…
see: What happens if I use Zap a Card on a Creeper/Keeper combo?
A: The Keeper and Creeper would get sucked up into that person’s hand… but a Creeper can never be in your hand, so the Creeper is then immediately played back to the table by that player. It would either then reattach to some other Keeper if possible, or hang around for as long as it takes for a new Keeper of the right type to show up to attach to.
Once you understand what’s happening with Beam Us Up in the normal case, you can figure out what will happen if someone has the Teleporter or Transporter in play. The Creeper won’t be left behind with the original owner, it is attached to the Keeper which is Beamed up, and when taken up into that person’s hand it’s then “spat out” in front of that player… not the person the Crew Member was taken from.