I have been dillying and dallying all morning and it just won't do. Time for some hard work! But what to work on today? Let's see… Yeah, the beetle juicing room! I need to complete some of my creations and not just invent new ones, and my sweet bugs are not quite ready for the market yet. Because I make sweet bugs in the beetle juicing room, not beetle juice, I'm in the candy business after all and not the beverage business. I just wanted it to sound ickily funny. Oh, and to confuse spies. Can't have Slugworth and Prodnose releasing sweet bugs before I do, can't have that! Of course, nobody's let into the factory anymore, but you can never be too careful… Didn't something suspicious happen just the other day? Oh and there were children in my factory too, poking children and their snooping parents, who knows what they were up to when I let them out of sight… All these little accidents just so I would have to send them off alone to be restored, perhaps they weren't accidents after all… That's right, they weren't. Right.
Well let's get back to business shall we! The beetle juicing room has triple doors with mosquito nets in between to keep the bugs in place. I wouldn't want them in my chocolate room, they would eat my mint leaves and make holes in my candy apples and pollinate my flowers, making them grow uncontrollably all over the room. And then they would just fall down dead in the chocolate river, hordes of them, and the scrumptylicious flower would be contaminated. Not yucky, of course, because all of my bugs are delicious, but contaminated, all the wrong flavours in all the wrong places. How about Fudgemallow Delight With Crunchy Bug Legs, doesn't sound so appealing now does it? Perhaps it does… I'll make a mental note.
Done. The beetle juicing room is very neat. To make absolutively sure the bugs don't escape they're locked in glass tanks (I tried clear caramel but they kept eating their way out), each species separate except for the ladybirds and lice which lives in happy symbiosis. Oompa-Loompas in green vinyl overalls and gardener-style straw hats just for kicks are busy with their butterfly nets, studying the bugs' life patterns and reporting any unexpected flavour changes. I pass the tank with the shiny black hard liquorice spiders which weave spun sugar webs, the tank with the green minty apple caramel crickets which actually sing, and the tank with the lemon and liquorice wasps which sting your tongue with a chilli edge. All of those are already perfected but I'd like to release my sweet bugs all at once. Not release-release, I'm no bloody animal rights activist, but pack them up neatly in little boxes and sell them.
I stay in front of the ants' tank for a bit and study them. Their tank is filled with massive chocolate which they have been digging tunnels in. The ants are made of burnt sugar and their queen lays little jelly eggs. She has to be especially fed with jelly to do that, if she ate her way through the chocolate like the other ants do she would just lay chocolate eggs. I have not got the hang of metamorphosis yet, if I had the jelly eggs would hatch into new burnt sugar ants too. I was hoping for that but I'll probably just release them as they are when my other bugs are ready. After all, I will sell more of them if people can't hatch their own burnt sugar ants at home. Some worthless villains might take up breeding and re-selling and we can't have that.
The ladybirds and lice have a tank full of green mint plants. The lice live off the plants and the ladybirds live off the lice. They don't eat them, that would be a waste of sellable sweets, they stroke them and a drop of sour juice appears, which they eat. That's beetle juicing for you. The fluorescent green lice taste of the most delicious lime. Lime lice, hehe. They're so tiny they always leave you craving for more, and what's better then than to finish off with a ladybird? The heads and legs of the ladybirds are liquorice and as for the red part, some of them are cherry and some are strawberry, you don't know what you get until you taste them. I prefer cherry but strawberry goes better with the lime lice. Since I'm not having any lice today I scrutinise the ladybirds until I spot one which looks decidedly cherry-ish. Not that there's any visible difference, but I'm Willy Wonka after all. I lower my hand into the tank, careful not to scare the chosen one, and let it crawl onto my index finger. Then I stick my tongue out and the bug takes off and lands on it. I close my mouth and feel it crawling about on my tongue, tickling me. This should be sensational. As the caramel begins to melt it creeps slower and slower until it has no little liquorice legs left. I can feel the cherry now, attaboy!
The main attraction of the beetle juicing room is the dragonfly tank in the far end, which is more of a greenhouse really and large enough to enter. It consists mainly of a syrup basin with beautiful candied water lilies floating on the surface. Around the basin there's just enough room for a narrow path of caramel tiles, but since the basin's round and the room square there's more space in the corners, space for some potted candy trees and a seat seemingly made of marble but actually of caramel. Instead of a cushion there's gumdrop moss growing on top of the seat, very comfy. I come and sit here sometimes, enjoying the heat and the beauty of the place and the sugary scent of syrup.
I have a seat and reach out my arm, waiting for one of the dragonflies which flutter all about the room to have a seat too. When one does, I swiftly catch it by the legs, careful not to break its clear caramel wings. It's absolutely gorgeous. Its milk chocolate body is covered with intricate patterns of dark and white chocolate, and its delicate wings are trembling slightly. I pluck them off one by one and crunch and munch them. Oh yes, it's very good, I think I've outdone myself again. The wings are so fragile they're almost not there, yet give you a pleasant sensation of sweetness and crunchiness. The de-winging done, I break the chocolate body between my teeth with a plop! It's all gooey inside with soft caramel. Lovely as it is, something needs to be done about the caramel. The dragonflies come with different fillings but none out of the ordinary praline fillings. Now, if I wanted to make pralines I wouldn't go out of my way to put caramel wings on them and have them flying about the room. I need my dragonflies to be something extra, something beyond beautiful winged pralines. Perhaps I could add some unusual flavours suitable for dragonflies? Reeds? Reed flavoured caramel? Or fresh water? Frog eggs? No, not frog eggs, definitely not frog eggs. Perhaps water lily though…
Determined to explore dragonfly-related filling flavours in the inventing room later I busy myself with the gumdrop larvae. I want them to wriggle really convincingly without wriggling all over the place like the wriggly sweets. Tricky. The winged bugs will fly away if you're not careful, not very far but still, but I want the larvae to stay right where you put them, wriggling for decorative purposes only.
After a hard day's work in the beetle juicing room I'm stepping into the glass elevator. Where to? What to do next? Should I have dinner today? I think I need to go the the Willy or won't he room because I really don't know. Oh no, please, that would be overdoing it. I lock myself in there until I have made up my mind and it sure makes me make up my mind quickly because it's the most boring room in the factory, more boring than the bored room even, which is actually full of diversions since it's the room I go to when I'm bored. I so do not feel like going to the Willy or won't he room but I can't decide so I press the button and I'm off.
The glass elevator comes to a halt in front of a very plain door. It's actually the only beige door in the factory, and behind it lies its only beige room. I have to go in there now unless…
Oh good! I don't have to go in there because I already made up my mind. I will.
Phew, that was close. I can't remember the last time I was actually in the Willy or won't he room.
I think I'm going to walk instead. Nothing gets the digestion going like a brisk walk to the dining room, and there's nothing wrong with my legs despite me using a cane. Most of the time I just use it as a fashion accessory anyway. I have to have it at hand to rest on though because sometimes I get so weary. I have a fragile constitution, see. I think I'm anemic, but my therapist Oompa-Loompa tells me it's just psychosomatic, or rather I tell him and he nods approval.
I walk down an endless corridor which is completely empty and sparkling clean. My floors are always shiny enough to eat from. Not that I'd ever wanna do that, ew. I keep my Oompa-Loompas busy, tidying every inch of the factory continuously. Never when I'm in sight though, I don't like to see it. Seeing them clean reminds me there was… dirt.
I hear the click-clacking of my heels and the tick-tacking of my cane and the occasional muted noise from the rooms I pass. The smacking from the smackaging room… the coughing from the coughable items room… the pinging and ponging from the ping pong room… the tapping from the tap along lessons room… the rapping from the sweet rappers room… the belching from the belching bon bons room… the smashing from the balderdash smash room… the popping from the whiz popping corn room… the mumbling from the peach mumble room… the whipping from the three line whips room… the farting from the love farts room… the burping from the burp storage room… the booming from the boom boom room… Ah, yes, the Oompa-Loompas are not being idle.
And here we are. The dining room. I give my hat and cane to the Oompa-Loompa in the servant's uniform standing by the door, because it's rude to sit down for dinner with your hat on. He bows strictly as he has been told and I enter the dining room. It's about as long as my entrance hall, but not as wide, and dimly lit by chandeliers. A mahogany table runs down its entire length with an equally long oriental carpet underneath and rows of mahogany chairs with red velvet cushions. At either end of the table there's a more luxurious chair with a stuffed back, just like the throne appearing in my welcoming puppet show. I actually borrowed one of these for the show but since I don't receive visitors very often it's back to it's usual place just underneath my delightful little derrière. A mirror is seated in the chair at the far end of the table. This way, I can propose a toast to myself. If it wasn't for the thick and highly ornamented golden frame I could almost believe someone was sitting there in the shadowy distance. Another me, the darn well best companion I could ever ask for.
A row of Oompa-Loompas in black dresses and white aprons bring in the food on silver plates. When they're done, they stand back by the walls, awaiting further orders. I only hear the occasional giggle, and eye them severely because dining is not a laughing matter. Can't have an Oompa-Loompa not giggling for very long though, and I'm a forgiving master.
A somewhat unconventional detail in my dining room furniture is the little red-carpeted mahogany stairs on my right, designed for the servant Oompa-Loompas to reach the table. My butler Oompa-Loompa climbs these stairs, pours the wine, and remain standing on top of the stairs, ready to refill my glass. Not that that's ever needed. I import the finest wine and have an Oompa-Loompa chef trained in the finest cuisine, but I only have a sip and a forkful. Food is not really my thing. I prefer dessert, which comes in tiny portions, highly decorated, and which I actually finish. Most of the time. Today I just inhale the fumes and pick up the decorative physalis and dark chocolate leaves with my gloved hand, eating them slowly and thoughtfully, leaving the minute orb of white chocolate mousse intact.