Lottie Morgan decides to use her week's vacation to visit her Uncle Andrew and his family at Wonka's Chocolate Factory. Little did she know that she was about to enter a magical, delectable world and capture the heart of the sweetest of men.

"All that is gold does not glitter; not all those that wander are lost."

J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring, 1954

Based on the 2005 Tim Burton film, starring Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka.

Lottie glanced out the train window, which rolled swiftly along the perfectly landscaped suburban backyards. She finished up some work email on her laptop. Requirements estimates…platform upgrades…team meeting…usability study. After scanning the rest of her emails, she closed her laptop.

She bent down into her bag to find a book to read. She pulled out two held them out for a minute, uncertain which of the two to read.

The first was Human Factors for Technical Communicators – a book she had been meaning to read for just over a year.She was always trying to try to make her work more relevant to users, and thought that learning the basics of user interface design might help her with this. Yes, online help authoring was fairly mundane, tedious work, but it gave her no small amount of satisfaction that somehow, somewhere, she could help someone find a little more information quickly and easily.

The second book was The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien. Oh, how Lottie loved fantasy novels! She would pour over the novels of Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Roald Dahl, Lewis Caroll, and J.M. Barrie over and over again, propelled into a mystical world where beings were limited only by their imaginations. White magic, mythology, folklore, quests, castles in the air, elves, and –she smiled – even hobbits dwelled in realms she believed were maddenly allusive, but fascinating nevertheless. If she could fly to far-off realms where her dreams could sail away on …if she, Lottie, could write such a novel as to inspire the souls of others…

She was rather rudely awakened from her reverie by a young-looking attendant. "Excuxe me, ma'am would you like something to snack on?" he asked.

Lottie winced. Ma'am. She felt so old. She was, in fact, only thirty, but felt much older than her years.

"What do you have?" Lottie hadn't eaten for a while – three or four hours, at any rate.

"Let's see now: potato chips, an apple, or chocolate-covered cherries," he stammered. She felt for the boy: he couldn't have been over sixteen and looked uneasy at the reality of being employed.

"Um… chocolate-covered cherries, please," she said with a hint of a smile, remembering her destination. Lottie had a week vacation left to take for the year from her job as a technical writer, so she decided to visit her Uncle Andrew and his family at Wonka's Chocolate Factory.

After paying him and said, suddenly full of pride, "Actually, I'm on my way to a chocolate factory – Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. My relatives live there."

The boy stared at Lottie with wide eyes, suddenly very animated. "You're going to Wonka's Factory? The man with the golden tickets?"

Before she could answer, other people sitting near her overheard him and began talking excitedly.

"You're going to Wonka's Factory!"

"THE Willy Wonka? The only with the Wonka Whipple Scrumptious Fudgemallow Delights? I love those!"

"Do you know Charlie Bucket, then?"

"I heard Willy Wonka can make chewing-gum that never loses its taste…" began a little girl.

"…and sugar balloons that you can blow up to enormous sizes before you pop them with a pin and gobble them up!" finished her twin sister.

"I got an eatable marshmallow pillow for my birthday!" exclaimed another.

Lottie blushed as she shyly looked around. She stammered, "Yeah, that's the guy."

"I heard he's pretty weird – some anti-social nut case."

Lottie bit her lip and listened. The comment came from behind her. She turned around and peered at an older man sitting there with a sardonic grin. She stared and him a minute, baffled. Suddenly, a voice that she soon recognized as her own announced to him:

"I think he's brilliant!"

A little overwhelmed by her announcement, she sat back in her seat, blushing. People around her continued to murmur, but she tried to ignore them all and concentrate on her book.

She felt a strange need to defend a man she had never seen in her life. She didn't understand. Charlie had praised him to the stars to her over the telephone. People around the world loved him. He was world famous. Surely, deep down, she thought that nobody could be truly wicked that made such delightful candy.

As the murmurs began to die down around her, she opened the package she had bought earlier and popped a chocolate-covered cherry into her mouth. She took a deep breath, slumped back in her seat, and pushed her nose in her book.

She eyes rested on a sentence from the page.

"His house was perfect, whether you liked food, or sleep, or work, or story-telling, or singing, or just sitting and thinking, best, or a pleasant mixture of them all," she read from the page. Suddenly, she began to get quite intrigued by the idea of meeting Willy the infamous Willy Wonka.