If You Want to View Paradise…


"We shouldn't go in there."

"It'll be fine."

"Okay, correction. I don't want us to go in there."

"Then don't go in."

"There was an us in that sentence. I don't want us to go in."

"I'm included? So you do care!"

"Please take this seriously."

"It's just a factory, I don't see what the big deal is."

Despite what you might think, the sassy one in this byplay was not in fact me. Meaning Leo, of course. And the cautious one was not in fact our resident blue genie. Meaning Aria.

No no no. Our usual roles were flipped. The reason?

"It's not just a factory Aria, it's a death trap."

"It's a chocolate factory. What could possibly happen?"

It's a bit of a long story.

A few hours ago, we had just gone through a couple of quick sight-seeing trips and started to get hungry, but the final place we had stopped off at didn't have much good food (unless you counted centuries old irradiated Blamco Mac & Cheese as good food,) so we checked Aria's book for any places that were affordable (read: free.)

What we ended up picking was an alternate future of humanity that had taken to the stars and discovered a planet that's gravity was incredibly weak at certain points, allowing for the creation of floating cities that dominated the stratosphere. It was similar to Bespin, except this planet also had a perpetual sunset that turned the sky in to a beautiful shade of orange.

We sat at a restaurant at the very edge of a floating city named New Chicago (whoever named it should be given an award for originality.) It was a Friday, in standard Earth time, and the restaurant had a special where between the hours of four and five all meals from a select menu were free. How that was a good marketing strategy I don't know, but the spaghetti bolognese was fantastic so I wasn't about to complain.

Anyhow, the dessert came around and I ordered myself a chocolate mousse, which prompted a conversation with Aria that led me to learn she had never had chocolate before. Other sweets, yes. Not chocolate.

So, I split my mousse with her and she fell in love with it. Another conversation starts about how it's made. How cocoa beans are grown. Famous brands.

One thing led to another I made the mistake of mentioning one of the most famous chocolate producers in the multiverse. And no, I'm not talking about Hershey.

A flash and a teleport, and here we were standing in front of a factory of ridiculously large proportions. It stood grey and dreary even amongst the beautiful weather, a paradoxical sight considering the wonders within. Puffs of smoke drifted out of tall exhaust pipes that scraped the skies above. It looked almost like a castle of old, except the castle had been designed by an architect that had seen 1920s England and said, "Yeah, I like that." It had its own unique charm in a way.

But the main attraction wasn't the towers nor the dreariness, nor the pipes nor the smoke. It was the gate in the front that boasted a golden 'W', stylized in such a way that can only be called whimsical.

Aria was bouncing in place, currently donning a more human look of tan skin that she had whipped up to blend in. Of course, the bouncing killed any chance of being inconspicuous and people were staring at us.

To her side, I stood dragging my hand down my face in exasperation. I didn't want to be here, not in the slightest.

"Come on Leo, you're usually more daring than this. Literally not even six hours ago we were running from Deathclaws."

"I didn't think that we would actually run into them."

"We took the path labelled Deathclaw Valley."

"A coincidence I assure you, and besides Deathclaws are more pleasant than this place."

She stopped bouncing and gave me a patronizing look. "Again Leo, it's just a chocolate factory. Nothing bad is going to happen if we sneak in."

Somewhere in the afterlife, a man named Edward Murphy Jr. cackled maniacally as thunder and lightning pierced the sky above us. It was the middle of the day. No clouds at all either. In fact, many would say it was beach weather.

Aria didn't pay that any mind as she jumped the gate with a reluctant and anxious human right behind her.

It wasn't that I hated Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I adore the book and adore the movie even more. Both have just enough wacky hijinks to make for an incredibly entertaining children's story and enough fantastical elements to truly suck you into the magical world that is contained solely within an innocuous factory.

But it's because of these fantastical elements that this place had been purposefully left off of my bucket list of places to visit.

Candy to me is meant to be just that, candy. But Wonka isn't just the candy man, he's a scientist. He spends his time creating amazing versions of his famous sweets, but with this experimentation comes a lot of danger, which is why he had to keep warning the kids that entered to not touch anything without permission. Luckily the Oompa Loompa's know what they're doing, and whenever a kid pulled a stupid the little guys were there to bail them out.

We had no such supervision. It was just me and my innocent-to-the-danger-within genie.

"We are only going into the one room Aria, I'm serious. Then we leave." I said whilst pulling an air duct vent off of the wall outside.

"Yeah, yeah whatever you say." She waved me off before crawling in.

I sighed before following.

Oh, and yes you would be surprised just how easy breaking and entering is around the multiverse. I've been travelling for about two and a half weeks now and I've probably crawled through more air ducts than Tom Cruise. Sure, it's illegal, but according to multiple intergalactic laws that I've stumbled across so is dimension hopping without a license so bite me.

After about ten minutes of crawling through the ducts (which Aria was delighted to find didn't have dust but instead had cobwebs of cotton candy,) we dropped in front of a set of, to me, incredibly familiar doors at the end of a hallway that looked like a dolly zoom personified. Which is to say, it got smaller the closer it got to the door.

Aria got in my face with stars in her eyes. "Is this the room!? The one you were talking about!?"

I gave a hesitant nod and watched as she burst through the door in a rush.

I hung my head. 'I owe her for the Deathclaws,' I reasoned. I then realized that I would rather run from Deathclaws than enter that door and I had to dig even deeper into my soul to find a semblance of an argument for me going in there after Aria.

A small voice next to my conscious whispered, "She could get hurt if you don't."

I walked in.

Another voice, this one a little up and to the left from my conscious and closer to my nostalgic memories, started to sing a little tune in the voice of the late Gene Wilder.

The doors opened to a garden of wonder, one of the most iconic scenes in cinema history. Mushrooms made of marshmallows sprouted up in caps the size of tables. Bushes bore buttercups in the shape of teacups and made of crystalline sugar. The greenest grass to have ever grown grew on the ground below, and amongst it, little flowers with centers made of gumdrops and little rocks that were molded out of gobstoppers. Licorice vines hung off candy cane trees and stalks of gummy bears grew on the banks of a great chocolate river fed by an even greater chocolate waterfall.

Even though I didn't want to be there, I felt a sense of awe as I looked around at a world of pure imagination.

[-]

In the multiverse, very few things are actually well known about jinn. It wasn't that they were secretive or reclusive. Simply, they were relatively small in their population and tended to travel in large groups, so their existence is really only confirmed by those that see them pass by, and everyone else merely hears whispers of what they are. Most consider them a myth.

However, a few things about them have become famous enough across the many cosmoses to be accepted as common knowledge. For one, they wield the great ability to bend the universe to their will, although this power is constrained by various sets of oddly specific rules. Two, they come in two natural colors, red and blue. Red ones are considered more powerful but are often evil and manipulative in a way that causes their own downfall. This makes them great temporary politicians in jinn government. Lastly, and more importantly for the point being made, everyone and their mother somehow knows that jinn are gluttons.

So basically, Aria was thoroughly enjoying herself.

She bit into a marshmallow mushroom and nearly moaned at the way it melted in her mouth. She chomped on a liquorish vine and was ecstatic to find it tasted like a gummy, fresh strawberry. She licked the side of a candy cane tree and her taste buds jumped for joy at the explosion of peppermint. She even dared to eat a blade of grass. It tasted like a watermelon sour gummy. She was in a heaven of confectionary delights.

But if she was in heaven, then the river of chocolate before her must have been whatever the next step up was. It had only been a few hours since she had first tried the impossibly delicious delicacy that was chocolate but seeing a flowing river of it nearly made her shed a tear.

She snuck a peek backwards at Leo to find him cautiously nibbling on a sugar buttercup. She didn't get why he was so scared to come to this place. Something about evil squirrels and gum that turns you into a blueberry ? But nothing about this place looked inherently dangerous. Maybe if you fell into the river you could possibly drown but you just had to, you know, not fall in. Or drown.

Aria dipped her finger into the current, took a taste, and nearly melted right then and there. She felt bad for future Aria because this set a high standard of chocolate for herself.

After one or two more cupfuls of the chocolaty river she got up and spotted a door off to the side of the room. Her curiosity peaked she snuck her way through the door. She would only be gone for a second, Leo would never know a thing.

[-]

Aria must have thought she was being sneaky when she went through the door, but I saw her immediately. The only reason why I didn't call out to her before she left was because when I tried to chase after her I tripped over a gumdrop rock and fell flat on my face.

The dirt tasted like crumbled Oreos.

Scrambling to my feet I rushed through the tiny maintenance door that was probably made for Oompa Loompas and opened it to find a hallway not unlike the one at the entrance to the chocolate river room, except this one had a bunch of doors to each side like it was straight out of a Scooby-Doo chase scene.

This of course tickled my fear senses because there was no indication of which one Aria went through. I could only pick the nearest one and pray.

I stepped through the one on my right and fell down a tube.

'God damn it.'

I fell screaming for a while, maybe a whole twenty seconds, before gravity seemed to go sideways and I fell to the left. Then right. Then sideways!? Suddenly there were a lot of colors. Every color of the rainbow, colors I'd never seen and ones I didn't even think existed. I tasted raspberry lemonade. I smelled the scent of takoyaki. I've never even had takoyaki! I felt orange and heard reddish brown. A recipe for blueberry muffins was seared into my mind. I suddenly had a strange hankering for ginger tea.

Then as soon as the overload of information began it ended, and I was kicked right out of the door that I had entered. I didn't move for a few minutes, my body just trying to get over the shock of everything. When I looked back up at the door, I noticed a small sticker on it that said, "Sensory Stimulation Simulation," and in even smaller letters beneath it "Work in Progress."

I groaned something that might have sounded like Klingon.

The next door was unlabeled, to my unending terror, but I pushed through it anyway.

It was just an empty room with a single chair in the center. On the chair was a large gummy bear.

I slowly pulled the door closed, and when there was merely a crack left, I heard a giggle.

Next door.

This went on for a bit. There was a room with a bunch of hopping chocolate bunnies, another where everything was upside down and smelt suspiciously like oatmeal cookies, and couple that were overflowing with boxes of granulated sugar, and a very strange one that just opened to reveal a wall.

There was also one that didn't have a room. Just a void. I stared into it, and it stared back at me. I was shocked when it blinked first and spat into my arms a rock with googly eyes. I named it Harold, put it into my pocket, and moved on.

Eventually I reached the final door. I brushed off some sprinkles from the room prior, took a deep breath, and walked through.

The room that I walked into was dark and cavernous. Webs of cotton candy coated the walls, some stretching out across the cave in a mosaic of sticky sugar. Stalactites and stalagmites that looked to be made of rock candy protruded from the ceiling and floor, crystalline bits of sugar embedded within glistening in the light coming from the still open door. A bit of liquid dripped slowly off of one and on to my arm. I gave it a tentative lick.

It was just sweetened water.

I stepped a little further into the room, my hand brushing a string of one of the webs causing it to vibrate slightly. I felt on edge at the lack of, well, anything that was going on. Usually something would have happened by now. Even the closets with sugar had them actively overflowing like they were being piped out of the boxes.

Then I heard chittering. Clicking. Soft padded noises like a million little legs scuttling across the floor.

A shadow flitted to my left. Something moved overhead.

The light from the door vanished.

I froze and slowly turned around to find, silhouetted against the frame of the door, a giant fur clad spider. Its bulbous body hung from the ceiling on a single strand of cotton candy web. Its eyes stared unblinkingly, it's mandibles twitched erratically with viscous fluids dripping down them like sap.

It was pink by the way. This didn't nor does it detract from how absolutely terrifying it was, but it was in fact cotton candy pink.

I screamed a bloodcurdling scream, it leaped at me, and we both ran deeper into the cave.

[-]

Aria was having a great time.

She had spent a few minutes wandering through rooms, each of which were a blast except that one that was just a cave, whatever that was about. She had eventually found a door at the end that led to a bouncy house made of elastic gummies, which led to a winter wonderland with multicolored snow flavored like snow cones (she avoided the yellow snow just in case,) which in turn led to a labyrinth of a room with stacks upon stacks of apple pies.

The room she found herself in currently was the most standard for a factory, just conveyor belts everywhere laden with packaged "Scrumdiddlyumptious" bars, "Fudge Mallows," and the simple but perfect "Wonka Bars".

There were other non-chocolate candies about, but Aria was taking her time to savor the chocolaty ones.

She was basking in the glow of sugary goodness when she jumped at the sound of a 'slam' behind her. She whipped around and saw Leo with his back against the door she had come through, covered in multicolored snow and looking drained.

"We're leave," he said.

Aria pouted and opened her mouth to protest but stopped at his pleading look. With a sigh she piled some candy bars into her arms as Leo stepped away from the door and raised the Watch up to leave. "Fine. Just give me a minute to grab some stuff to go."

"We have ten seconds."

She raised an eyebrow as she balanced a candy rope on a Fudge Mallow. "Jeez, no need to rush me you grump."

"No, I mean we have maybe ten seconds before the spider finally gets past that maze of apple pies."

Aria blinked. "Huh?"

Leo wasn't looking at her, and instead had his eyes locked on an odd candy sitting alone on one of the conveyor belts. It had nine protruding parts, each of a different color. "I managed to gain some ground in the snow, but the thing moves pretty fast. Five seconds by the way."

Bemused, she easily set some coordinates as Leo took the strange candy and pocketed it, murmuring something about "at least having a souvenir."

Just as the door burst open to the horrifying sight of an enraged overgrown arachnid, light filled the room and its two previous occupants vanished, along with about fifty-seven chocolate bars and a special little gobstopper.


A/N:

A hand bursts out of the dirt of a graveyard, clawing its way to the world above and bringing with it a haggard but smiling individual.

I'm alive! Past few months have been a killer, what with exams and college stuff. Don't worry about it, but I'm glad I could get this out considering I've been thinking about it and my other story pretty much every single day. Phew, finally! This location was one I wanted but had trouble writing until I realized that I can do literally whatever in Wonka's Factory. But I didn't want to do too much.

As funny as it would have been to have them get kidnapped by Oompa Loompas, I just wanted Wonka to be a short trip. Maybe I'll go back and write more for this, but for now I must push onwards!

Thank you to everyone who reviewed as well and submitted places to visit because WOW I did not think of a lot of those locations. Like, from pokemonking0924 I would have never thought of Monsters Incorporated but now I'm intrigued. I also didn't think about souvenirs, which I will grab because why not. This story has no real structure so I could use some items for Leo and Aria down the line if I decide to do anything. And yes, they will definitely at least go through costume changes at the very least. Actual transforming is something I'll have to think about if the situation calls for it. Might be more fun to write if I need to force them to sneak around.

To answer SkullGreymond, Leo is 100% a cook. Home cook, not professional, but has definitely cooked for and enjoys cooking for others.

For Kunoichi69 (nice), time travel duties will likely come up and also every single one of those items sounds awesome. Will he get any of them? Maybe he will!

Yes Mr. Sonic07, they can certainly visit universes more than once and Elkia is a really, really good idea.

And TurboDriver07... Agrabah? Hell. Yes.

To the Guest who mentioned Thomas the Tank engine, that sounds funny and dope as hell.

Thank you everyone, feel free to keep mentioning places no matter how obscure they are. I may not get to them all but I sure as heck love the ideas. I do have an idea for the next one that will be much easier (and faster) to write, but I may use one of y'all's locations for the one after.

By the by I don't own Willy Wonka nor (because I didn't say this last time) One Piece. I think those rights belong to Nestle and Oda, respectively.

Welp, don't have much else to say except I hope you enjoyed and thanks for reading! Like, seriously thank you. I didn't expect anybody to actually have any vested interest in this little wacky story that I started on a whim and I appreciate the enthusiasm. Whenever the next update is (hopefully sooner rather than later now that summer is upon us and I have TIME) I'll see you then. Leo and Aria are going to be spending some time trying to beat a certain space related record.

Peace!

Concepts and Cookies