The next afternoon Charlie could tell something was horribly wrong. Wonka was in his office. Quietly. Doing paperwork.

Paperwork.

It was not as if this was a new chore, but it was one Wonka usually tried to pile onto anyone else who seemed even remotely convenient at the time, including Charlie. Charlie had been filling out service forms and calculating profit predictions before he'd even learned what all of the kooky math symbols were, resulting in some rather interesting product placement and budgeting. In fact, it was probably due to Charlie's sometimes creative solutions to unsolvable math problems that resulted in the horrible Maple Whip Delights still being on the shelves.

But even the thought of something practically inedible coming out of Wonka's factory was far less disturbing than the sight of Willy Wonka sitting calmly behind his desk, for all purposes looking quite content in rounding off integers in product estimations. Charlie blinked twice to make sure he was, in fact, awake, and had not been knocked unconscious by a speeding vehicle on the walk home from school, resulting in a hideous vision of normalcy in the Wonka Factory.

Deep breath.

"Mr. Wonka? Willy?" Charlie said carefully, approaching the desk as one might a dying hospital patient. "Are you all right?"

"My dear boy!" Wonka said, looking up with a tranquil smile. "How was your day at school? Sit down and tell me all about it."

Charlie sat down slowly on a seat across from Wonka, never taking his eyes off the man. Wonka's voice was different today. It sounded like…it sounded like a normal person's voice should. It was not squeaky. It was not even nervous. Charlie fought the urge to run away screaming. "You've never asked me about my day. You always jump out of your chair the moment you see me and demand that we quit wasting time with things like hellos and get down to work."

"Well I'm asking you now, aren't I?" Wonka answered, cocking his head to the side.

Charlie gave him a befuddled look. It was entirely too logical an answer for someone like Wonka. "I-I guess it was ok, Mr. Wonka. H-How was yours?"

Wonka looked thoughtful for a moment before responding, "Productive."

They sat and stared at each other in complete silence for a good minute before Charlie shifted uncomfortably and said, "Well…what are we doing today, Willy? Lassoing those wild kumquats, are we? You know, I've been looking forward to it all week – "

"That can wait. The strangest thing occurred to me this morning as I was doing some inventory. Charlie, you know all about making candy, but nothing about the business of candy."

Though still reeling from the thought of Wonka actually taking time to do inventory, Charlie did a double take. "The…business?" he said, as if the thought of the Wonka Factory being a business had never crossed his mind.

"Of course! It can't all be wild excursions into parts unknown, adventures in Inventing Room explosions, and the like. Once in a while, we just have to get down and dirty with the paperwork." Charlie was disturbed to see that Wonka seemed to be enjoying this.

It was not as disturbing as things to come, however.

The changes started slowly at first and could almost be overlooked. One morning as Charlie bounded out of his house and into the meadow on his way to school, the ground below him was considerably squishier than it ever had been before. Though lost in thought about his reading assignment for Rickshickle's class – which he had not done, instead devoting the previous evening to the nearly impossible feat of making black jelly beans taste good – he couldn't help but notice his trek seemed a bit skooshy and he looked down. His breath caught in his throat. The grass below him, which was normally a brilliant emerald, was wilting. And bordering on being brown.

Charlie justified this as the meadow not getting a good sugar water drenching in some time and went on his way. Dying swudge or not, it wouldn't be an excuse Rickshickle would hear of. He made a mental note to ask Mr. Wonka about it that night at dinner.

"How should I know?" Mr. Wonka said, with a slight tinge of impatience in his voice as he gloped more mashed potatoes on his plate. "Swudge is a fickle breed of plant, Charlie."

"But you made it," Charlie pointed out.

Pretending not to hear, Mr. Wonka said brightly, "I showed Charlie how to project earnings today!"

The other members of the family stared at him blankly for a moment. Heroically, Mr. Bucket piped up and responded, "Well…that's great, Charlie…I'm sure it was very…uh…informative."

Charlie resisted the teenage urge to say something ugly.

"And he caught on after only a few hours," Wonka said with a smile but gritting his teeth. "Just a few. A few hours which we could have spent doing something else."

"Yeah, like double-checking packing addresses. Or inspecting the new packing foam. Or something equally as important," Charlie said somewhat sarcastically. "I haven't seen the inside of the Inventing Room in nearly a week."

"Well, it's still there, I assure you." Something in this made Charlie lift an eyebrow but he remained silent. He noticed that Wonka rarely made eye contact with him anymore; it wasn't as if it was usual to begin with, but now even seemed more rare. Wonka sighed quickly. "Why don't we go after dinner, hm?"

Charlie sat up a little straighter. "Yeah, that sounds great!"

But Charlie soon found he was foolish to think that things would be the same. As Wonka fiddled with the third failed experiment of the evening, Charlie couldn't help but feel uneasy. It wasn't unusual for experiments to go awry, or to even flat out not work, but at least Wonka usually knew what the problem was and could remedy it quickly. But looking at Wonka now, he seemed to display something entirely new – confusion.

"I can't for the life of me understand why this isn't working," he muttered as the fourth failure began to bubble angrily. He leaned over the bowl, added a pinch of something pink, only to have the whole concoction make a giant POOF sound that left Wonka looking decidedly pinker than he had before. They sat in stunned silence for a moment before Wonka calmly pulled out a notebook. "Pink stuff…does not…work," he muttered as he wrote it down.

"You mean you don't even know what the pink stuff was?"

Wonka scratched his temple. "Well…to be honest…I can't really remember what it is. I used to know, but I've forgotten, it seems." He laughed nervously. "Silly, huh?"

The next afternoon, Charlie stepped into the Elevator, looking forward to a long, blissful evening of swimming in the pool made up entirely of brightly colored plastic balls and found that the button for that room was gone. Vanished. Confused, he looked up and down the columns of buttons to see if perhaps he had simply had a memory lapse as to the button's location, but no. It was nowhere to be seen. As his eyes roamed the rounded buttons, he couldn't help but notice the candy vegetable room was gone. And the My Size Lollipops room. Even the chocolate musical instruments room was nowhere to be found. Standing up to his full height, Charlie walked stiffly from the Elevator in shock.

He stumbled back into the swudge meadow and tripped over something, sending him crashing to the ground. Rolling over, he saw that it was a branch from one of the bubble gum trees. He frowned. He'd never known a bubble gum tree to lose a branch before. Looking up into said tree, his mouth dropped open. The whole tree seemed to leaning to one side and withering. It was the first thing he'd ever seen in the chocolate room…die. Charlie scrambled up and practically ran back to his house, not wanting to believe what he'd just seen.

But it wasn't an isolated incident. If buttons disappearing and inventions not working wasn't enough, there was now an eerie silence that descended over the Wonka factory. The machines continued to churn. The trucks continued to come and go from the factory, but it wasn't the same. Even the Oompa-Loompas seemed to sense something was up, and Charlie found that he'd seen far less of them than he normally did. He couldn't altogether convince himself that they weren't disappearing too.

It wasn't just buttons and Oompa-Loompas that were slowly vanishing, either. On several occasions, Charlie spotted a vacant spot in a room he could have sworn once held a machine or two. Where had they gone? And, much to Charlie's shock, there were three separate occurrences when even the room he was looking for was not where they were supposed to be. In fact, they was not anywhere at all. They were gone.

Wonka never seemed to understand what exactly Charlie was trying to ask him whenever he'd bring up the strange disappearances, and brushed it off as nothing to worry about. But worry Charlie did, and as he watched Willy Wonka fill out another inventory slip in the stocking room where they were, it hit him:

This was the place for Wonka's eccentricity, but now that that was gone, so were the things which were the products of that eccentricity.

Oy.

Charlie's impatience finally caught up with him one day as he and Wonka were filling out the forms for the new labels. He'd managed to keep his mouth shut for seven of the eight weeks of supposed "treatment," but could stand it not one second longer. Charlie threw down his pen on the desk and sighed, hoping for once Wonka would evade his questions. "Level with me here. You hate this stuff. All this red tape and bureaucracy. You've said it yourself. So what are we doing here?"

"Well, I'm sorry if you don't seem to think that label colors are important, Charlie. You know, I was reading this article in a psychology journal that certain colors will induce hunger more than others. So, if we can get those colors onto our labels, more people will buy Wonka's! Won't that be wonderful?"

Charlie winced. "Since when have we needed help selling Wonka's?"

"Charlie, the profit – "

"And the profit. We're doing fine. But this – " he pointed to the scattered pile of papers in front of them, " – is just…is just boondoggling."

Wonka looked offended. "Boondoggling? Really, Charlie. Do you honestly think I'd spend my time boondoggling?"

"Now I do!" Charlie cried, standing up. He made an exasperated sound. "That damn psychologist Ginker was right about all this, you know. I don't know whether he and his psychiatrist cronies knew that this would have been the effect of that stuff they gave you, but I hate it. I hate it, Mr. Wonka. This is idiotic, and if this is what it's going to be like from now on, I don't want any part of Wonka's. Understand? I don't want any part of it." Charlie sighed and looked down at his mentor, shaking his head. "I'll be outside in the hallway," he said quietly. "When you come to your senses, I'll be waiting."

With a this, Charlie turned and left the room, slamming the door dramatically behind him. A small smile crept up on Wonka's face and a chuckle escaped his lips. "Don't worry, Charlie," Wonka said softly in his old voice. "Nothing is ever as it seems at first."

A few hours later just as the sun was setting, Wonka emerged from the office to find his heir sitting on his floor, chin to his chest, fast asleep. The sight of a sleeping Charlie never ceased to cause a sentimental feeling arise deep in Wonka. He wasn't quite sure why, but he felt a sort of brotherly affection for the boy who had grown into a headstrong teenager. This transformation was just as baffling to Wonka as the affection he felt, but he also knew that Charlie's coming adulthood sometimes led him to miscalculate exactly what and who Willy Wonka was. This was infinitely more troubling to him than what any medication could do to him.

Or, in Wonka's case, couldn't do to him.

Wonka leaned down to the sleeping form and touched his shoulder lightly. "Charlie?" he whispered. The teenager did not stir. Wonka smiled and patted his heir's head lightly.

"Have faith, Charlie," he whispered to the sleeping boy. "Have faith in me."