18: Only Hinata Left

"Which room shall it be next?" said Wonka-san as he turned away and darted towards the elevator. "Come on! Let's get a move on! Oh, and how many children are there left now?"

Hinata looked at Naruto, and Naruto looked back at Hinata.

"But Wonka-san," Naruto called after him, "there's…there's only Hinata left now."

Wonka-san swung round and stared at Hinata.

There was a silence. Hinata stood there holding tight onto Naruto's hand.

"Y-you mean you're the only one left?" Wonka-san said, his face puzzled.

"Why yes," whispered Hinata. "Yes."

"Where happened to all the others?" Wonka-san asked them quietly. Hinata turned to Naruto, unsure of how to respond. She simply looked back at Wonka-san and waited.

Wonka-san suddenly exploded with excitement. "Oh my dear girl," he cried out, "That means you've won!" He rushed towards her and started shaking Hinata's hand so furiously Hinata felt it might come off. "Oh, I do congratulate you!" he cried. "I really do! I'm absolutely delighted! It couldn't be better! Wow absolutely wonderful this is! I hand a hunch, you know, right from the beginning, that it was going to be you! Well done, Hinata, well done! Now the fun is really going to start! But we mustn't dilly and we mustn't dally! There's even less time to lose now than there was before! We have an enormous amount of things to do before the day is through!"

Wonka-san turned round and stepped towards the elevator. "But luckily for us we have the Great Glass Elevator to help speed thing alo-"

His sentence was ended by a terrible SMACK, as he walked right into the glass doors of the elevator, clearly not seeing them and their transparentness. He regained his composure and pushed the wall button to open the doors. "S-speed things along." He finished as he stepped in. Hinata and Naruto followed him inside.

Hinata felt that something crazy was about to happen now. But she wasn't frightened. She wasn't even nervous. She was just terrifically excited. And so was Naruto. The young Genin's face was shining with excitement as he watched every move that Wonka-san made. He was reaching up for a button high up on the glass ceiling of the elevator. Naruto and Hinata both craned their necks to read what it said on the little label beside the button.

It read…UP AND OUT.

"Up and Out," asked Naruto, "What sort of room is that?"

Wonka-san pushed the button.

The glass doors closed.

"Hold on." Wonka-san said softly, smiling at both of them.

Then WHAM! The elevator shot straight up like a rocket! Hinata and Naruto braced themselves as the elevator shot upward, Wonka-san was holding onto a strap from the ceiling, and up they went, up, up, up, straight up this time, without any twisting or turnings, and Hinata could hear the whistling of air outside as the elevator went up faster and faster.

"Faster!" cried Wonka-san, banging the wall of the elevator with his hand. "We'll never break through going at this speed!"

"Break through what?" shouted Naruto. "What do we have to break through?"

"Ah-ha!" laughed Wonka-san, "you wait and see. I've been waiting, like, forever to press this button! Here we go, up and out!"

"But you don't mean…" shouted Naruto, "you don't really mean that this elevator…"

"Yeah, I do!" Wonka-san chuckled. He seemed to be overcome with a severe case of the giggles.

"But it's made of glass!" Naruto protested. "It'll smash into a thousand pieces!"

Wonka-san only laughed, a large smile on his face.

The elevator rushed on, going up and up and up, faster and faster and faster…

Then suddenly, CRASH! …and the most tremendous noise of splintering wood and broken masonry came from above their heads. The elevator had shot right up through the roof of the factory and was now rising through the air like a rocket, and the sunshine was pouring in through the glass roof. In five seconds they were thousands of feet up in the sky.

"We're gonna die!" Naruto yelled in a panic.

"Well that wouldn't be good, now would it?" Wonka-san said calmly, and he pressed another button. The elevator stopped. It stopped and hung in mid-air, hovering like a bumblebee, hovering over the factory and over the Konohagakure village itself, which lay spread out below them like a photograph. Looking down through the glass floor on which she was standing, Hinata could see the far away houses and the streets and the snow that lay thickly over everything.

It was an eerie and frightening feeling to be standing on clear glass up in the sky. It made Hinata and Naruto feel as if they weren't standing on anything at all.

"How does this crazy thing stay up!" Naruto cried.

"Huh?" Wonka-san asked. "How does it stay up? That's a very good question…" he stopped there and left Naruto hanging for a few seconds, before speaking up again. "Oh look," he cried, "there go the other children! They're returning home!"

"We must go down and take a look at our little friends before we do anything else," said Wonka-san. He pressed a different button, and the elevator dropped lower, and soon it was hovering just above the entrance gates to the factory.

Looking down now, Hinata could see the children and their parents standing in a little group just inside the gates. "I can only see three," she said. "What happened to Souya?"

"I expect that he's not in very good traveling condition and that his mother will have to come 'round to pick him up." Wonka-san said. "Do you see the trucks?" he pointed to a line of gigantic covered vans parked in a line nearby.

"Hai," Hinata said, "What are they for?"

"Don't you remember what it said on the golden tickets? Every child goes home with a lifetime's supply of sweets. There's one truckload of candy for each of them, loaded to the brim. Ah-ha," Wonka-san went on, "there goes our friend Yoriko Glupu! D'you see her? She's getting into the first truck with her mother!"

"You mean she's really alright?" asked Hinata, astonished. "Even after going up that awful pipe?"

"She's very much all right," said Wonka-san.

"She's changed!" said Naruto, peering down through the glass wall of the elevator. "She used to be fat! Now she's thin as a straw!"

"Of course she's changed," said Wonka-san, laughing. "She got squeezed in the pipe. Don't you remember? I expect she'll regain all that weight within a week with that truckload of chocolate. And look! There goes Tomoe Bulnose-chan, the great gum chewer! It seems as though they managed to de-juice her after all. I'm so glad, I was quite worried that she would have exploded before they could help her."

"D-demo, she's all purple!" Naruto cried.

"Ah well," Wonka-san said, "there's nothing we can do about that."

"Ohh!" cried Hinata. "Look at poor Masaru Kawasaki and his father! They're all covered in garbage!"

"Well…at least they aren't incinerated…" Naruto said quietly.

"Alright," Wonka-san said importantly, "It's time we left these three silly children. I have something very important to talk to you about, my dear Hinata." Wonka-san pressed another button, and the elevator swung upwards into the sky.