A/N: Response time!

Gs33022, noted. Ironically, the previous chapter originally didn't even have that closing paragraph, but then I hastily realized that the chapter ended a bit too abruptly otherwise. On further thought, though, the part that you pointed out pretty much is over-condensing details, what with being major. Originally, only the second of this new chapter's two scenes was going to be in the content, but I have now added the part about him coming home for supper here. Bonus points in that they seem to fit in continuity, I think.

Verucabeyotch, yeah, you would be doomed, since you would either die from the allergic reaction or die from getting poked by that needle and subsequently popping! Interestingly enough, I happen to be allergic to cherry juice, but not to the deadly level. (I just get red-marked burns wherever the juice touched. I can eat maraschino cherries, though, since they've had the juice bleached out.) Still, my being in a cherry version of this would NOT be pleasant; who knows how my organs would react?

Charlie paced home very slowly, trying to think of anything besides the bizarre spectacle he had just witnessed. Not even distracting himself with thoughts of the factory spaces he had encountered helped. Even if he made himself reflect on the most fun and cheerful aspects of today, his mind kept going back to his accidental walk-in on Violet in a disfigured shape. If he himself were turned into a blueberry, even just once, he would be quite upset, too.

He made it back at about ten minutes after five, Venus and the first few stars already having appeared in the sky. He was just in time; supper on Sundays, what with its double portions, always began between about a quarter past five to half past five whatever the time of year, excepting the times few and far between when his mother's boss had the need to keep her for overtime work, but she seldom went in on the weekends anyway.

Charlie opened the door and entered the shack. All five adults heard immediately and turned to the door to greet him. Mrs. Bucket had finished the last of the soaking of the soup.

"Hello, Charlie!" all of the voices cheered at once.

"Hi," he said. He was trying not to hang his head.

"You're just in time!" his mother remarked. "Would you be a dear and set the bed?"

"Will do," Charlie answered unenthusiastically. He approached the paltry shelf space near the stove and retrieved four bowls and four spoons, walking around the bed to place a set pair in front of each grandparent. He almost seemed to scuffle during this.

"So, did he let you bring home any free samples?" joked Grandpa Joe.

"No, it was very much abridged," replied Charlie.

Mrs. Bucket brought two chairs nearby and then approached the stove to retrieve the cabbage soup. She had two boiled potatoes on hand for seasoning, one of which she proceeded to cut open and scoop into six little fragments. Charlie, meanwhile, set his and her utensils by their seats.

"So, how did everything go today?" asked Grandma Josephine, cheery-eyed.

Charlie shrugged. "Well, how much do you want to hear?"

"Everything! Why, that man is a living legend!"

"You didn't have time to tell us about it when you came in briefly to fetch your paper route sack," Mrs. Bucket pointed out to encourage him.

"Well, I…" He struggled to think of the right way to put this. As his mother was now walking around the rest of the family to pour their portions of cabbage soup and insert a little lump of boiled potato in each bowl, he paused to hold out his own.

Once it was filled and everybody was settled and ready to eat, he continued. "…it was great, I guess. Some parts were really fun."

The grandparents looked amongst each other, confused. Charlie had been a huge fan of the Wonka Corporation for his entire life, and he was describing the trip thusly? How puzzling.

"'Great'?" asked Grandpa George. "It wasn't 'spectacular' or 'marvelous'? Just 'great'?"

"Oh, it's the most beautiful place I've ever seen!" answered Charlie, now sounding much more enthusiastic. "I saw only four major rooms, and he asked me not to tell the few parts linked to his secrets, but there was this huge meadow made of candy—I mean it, there was edible cream on the giant mushroom tops, and jellybeans were growing out of the bushes!" He did not include the business-critical chocolate river, as he had so promised to Mr. Wonka.

"Gee, it sounds like something that Lewis Carroll would think up!" Grandpa George remarked to his wife. They both chuckled briefly.

"Mr. Wonka also has this thing that looks like a gold lift, but it runs on a track that goes in all directions instead of traveling between floors. We took it to a room that housed a bunch of odd animals," Charlie continued. "I got to feed a pygmy elephant."

"A pygmy elephant in a chocolate factory?" commented Grandma Georgina.

Charlie nodded. Rather than explain Loompaland and thus how Mr. Wonka was able to keep his business going, he explained, "It was from someplace I never knew existed until today. Mr. Wonka once went there to try to find ideas for new candies, and the zoo was built as an inspiration from the trip."

Grandma Josephine smiled before taking the last bite of potato seasoning from her cabbage soup and finishing off the liquid. "Mary?" she asked, pointing to the bowl.

"Of course, Mom!" Mrs. Bucket replied. She got up, collected Grandma Josephine's soup bowl, approached the stove, and proceeded to scoop the second helping that everybody was allowed at this time of the week. She also cut open the second potato and scooped out part of it to add to the soup.

Charlie still easily could be heard from the stove, so he continued. "There was also this desert replica that had cookie crumbs for sand, but it looked so real! Pyramids were made out of gigantic marshmallows, and the room even had a…"

He struggled at this part. He was thinking of the blueberry milkshake oasis, but the mere thought of blueberries brought Violet Beauregarde to mind.

"…a Violet blueberry oasis in an open space…" he described by nervous Freudian slip.

Mrs. Bucket was now sitting back down from the refill. "What is a 'Violet blueberry oasis'?" she asked, puzzled. All of the grandparents were, too.

"The oasis was purplish-blue in color and made of blueberry milkshake instead of water," Charlie explained truthfully. He was still rather nervous.

"Boy, with all of this edible stuff that was apparently around, I'm surprised you didn't spoil your supper!" Grandpa Joe commented, laughing.

"Yeah. I guess I am, too," Charlie said softly. He was almost done with his first helping.

A moment of silence passed. Charlie finally broke it by continuing. "Then, we just went in this vehicle that bathed us in soda and headed to a place where a bunch of artwork that was made of wax candy was displayed. I made a chocolate toothpaste tube." He was looking unenthusiastically at his bowl as he mentioned these parts, and his voice was troublingly low.

"I remember when you were five, you showed your father a drawing of some new toothpaste that you wanted him to make!" Grandma Josephine remarked. "What goes around, comes around!"

Charlie cringed involuntarily at the double mention of the word "around". He was reminded instantly of Violet's nearly round blueberry body.

"I remember that," he replied.

Having finished the contents of his bowl, Charlie got up and scuffled over to the stove to collect his second helping, including the second helping of a spoonful of boiled potato. He scuffled back to his chair, looking just as troubled.

"Did anything else happen?" asked Grandpa George.

"No, that was it. I guess it was good."

Something was up, the five adults deduced. Charlie never would hold a mediocre attitude towards anything related to Willy Wonka.

"Is something bothering you, Charlie?" asked Grandpa Joe.

Charlie sighed. "Well, it's just that…"

He could not tell them Violet's problem. She had made him promise to be sure of that. He was worried for her welfare, despite the fact that she was far from an ideal role model for manners. Right now, while he was fully able-bodied, she was stuck with nothing but slow feet anchored on either side. Charlie did not know that, at this moment, a longtime friend of Mr. Wonka's was helping her to have supper in the most effective way possible, but even if he did, the concern still would not leave.

There was, however, something else that also really bothered him about the discovery. He decided to be as truthful as possible and disclosed this alternative.

"…well, do you remember about Violet also being involved today?"

Charlie's mother and grandparents nodded.

"She nearly always has gum in her mouth. Do you remember that, too?"

"Of course," said Grandma Josephine. "So, those three times we saw her weren't just a coincidence that she was chewing some?"

"There's more to it," Charlie clarified. "Just before I left, I discovered that she's been trying to break somebody's record for how long she chewed a single piece without throwing it away. When she's eating, she keeps it stored behind her ear. I saw it happen twice today."

Grandma Georgina in particular was caught off-guard. She happened to have sipped a bit of soup at this very moment and had to swallow it quickly before she choked from the surprise. "Are you telling us that she goes right back to chewing it afterwards?"

Charlie nodded, disturbed.

"That's completely disgusting!" Grandma Georgina continued. "Everybody knows from experience with hygiene that the back of a human ear is a major dandruff trap. Who knows what she's been chewing besides that gum over time?"

"She has it stuck somewhere in her room for safekeeping during the night, too," said Charlie, thinking back to when Violet had requested it of him. Reflecting on the whole incident, he realized that she had been quite impolite. She had called him a dope, had snapped at him to leave at least twice, and had used an irritated vocal tone throughout. Granted, it wasn't exactly too different from how she had behaved around Mr. Wonka during the little exploration, and that had been when she had had her normal body, so her being angry that this had happened to her couldn't have been an excuse.

Grandma Georgina covered her mouth, but everybody else in the room kept their cool.

"Charlie," added Mrs. Bucket, trying to sound reassuring, "there are many different types of people out there. Some are more polite than others, some are more demeaning than others, and still others have various positive and negative traits combined that make their character hard to distinguish. As long as one can recognize what is good conduct and not, then one has steps to go further in life."

"She's also fonder of being a smart aleck than I realized," Charlie added. "When something ticks her off, she gets mouthy about it." Still, that did not affect the fact that he felt sorry for what she had to go through. As it was still early in the evening, she still looked like that large blueberry.

"But she didn't spoil the trip for you, right?" asked Grandpa George, just making sure.

"Oh, not at all! My favorite part was when I got to taste a bunch of candy plants in that one meadow of Mr. Wonka's, although the edible cookie crumb sand in his desert was a close second."

"Heh, maybe if you had brought our little Mason jar with you, you could have snuck some of the things you tasted for later use!" Grandpa Joe commented.

Charlie chuckled. "Possibly! I really wish from this that we could have vanilla cookies."

Supper continued with no further concerns, as far as everybody else besides Charlie went. He still couldn't help but reflect on the last thing he saw before he was excused from the factory, and his reflection showed in his still-troubled manner, but nobody prodded any further because they assumed that it was merely his disgust at observing Violet's less than ideal behavior. To be honest, that really did bother him, especially with the unhygienic implications, but to a somewhat lesser extent.

...

"Okay, everyone! Time's up! Pencils down, please!"

Mr. Turkentine had just finished the timed test for the morning. While he had announced a few weeks ago, to the class's disgust, that he had decided to switch Friday's schedule to Monday so that the test for the week's unit would occur before the material was covered, he had turned out merely to have been trolling. In actuality, he was adding a pre-test to the curriculum on Mondays so that he could see which students already knew what about the lesson, not that it would have mattered to such an incompetent teacher anyway. In this way, the class was being tested before they learned it, but as a sort of evaluation, with the actual tests still taking place as intended.

A few groans were heard, but everybody dropped their pencils as requested. Slowly, they got up and walked in single file to place their papers face down on Mr. Turkentine's desk.

"Thank you," he remarked as the last of his students took his seat again.

Once everybody was facing Mr. Turkentine's way again, he continued. "Now, as the more perceptive of you no doubt have picked up from our little pre-test, this week's maths lesson will be on a concept called 'probability'." He stood up, turned around, picked up a piece of chalk, and proceeded to write both 1:4 and ¼ side-by-side on the chalkboard. "Probability can be written as either a ratio or a fraction. Does everyone understand?"

The class replied with mostly shrugs. One student even groaned quite loudly.

"Bertie Upside, how many times do I have to tell you that groaning is something that walruses do?" Mr. Turkentine scolded him. "One of these days, you're going to groan one time too many, and downward-pointing tusks will grow out of your mouth!"

"But I just don't get it, Mr. Turkentine!" the student responded in self-defense.

"Then you should have said so," Mr. Turkentine replied smartly. He picked up the chalkboard eraser and erased the two ratios that he had just written, to free up the space again.

Charlie took a side glance at Bertie. Violet did a lot of groaning, too, and she had something growing underneath her skin regularly. Charlie knew that his teacher was just being sarcastic about the walrus tusks, but still, Charlie couldn't help but wonder if Violet was cursed for something similar?

Mr. Turkentine pulled out a round, blue bowl from a storage cabinet and set the bowl on his desk. "When you calculate the likelihood of an event, the outcome is its probability. Something can be highly probable, highly improbable, inevitable, or impossible. For instance, if I were to say that—oh, I don't know—a bolt of lightning is going to crash through the ceiling and strike me dead within a minute, that would be impossible because there's no storm coming today. The weather forecast for today called for sun, and since meteorologists are experts in the field of probability, they certainly would know this."

Several confused looks dispersed throughout the classroom. Way to use circular reasoning to explain something that sounded professional yet was as clear as mud. This wasn't anything new when it came to his inefficient teaching methods.

Mr. Turkentine patted the bowl that he had just set on his desk. "I have right here a collection of multi-colored paperclips. Now, I have no idea how many are in here, but it's still a high enough quantity to make enough of a variety in color. When I come around to each of your desks, I want you to take out just one paperclip, without looking, and set it where I can see it." He was obviously disregarding the fact that the total number of paperclips was necessary in order to calculate the probability ratios of all of the colors.

He stood up and walked to the front desk on the far left, from the students' perspective. One by one, as he stopped by each, they pulled out one paperclip and set it in plain sight on their desks.

In a moment, he reached Charlie. Charlie now had an extremely up-close view of the bowl of paperclips, and the color and shape were especially unsettling. It was shaped like a fishbowl but smaller, and it had an opaque, blue color that was close to that of a blueberry. Immediately, he was reminded of yesterday evening. His imagination took its toll, and although he didn't want this to happen, his mind pictured a brunette head coming out of the top of the bowl, and a pair of useless hands growing out of the sides. He closed his eyes in hesitation.

"Charlie Bucket!" he heard his teacher call out, pulling him back to reality.

"Oh, uh…" He opened his eyes and saw the normal bowl again.

"Please grab a paperclip," Mr. Turkentine coaxed sternly.

"Sorry," Charlie mumbled. He pulled out a paperclip as instructed.

"Thank you," said Mr. Turkentine, in a rather smart manner. He proceeded to the next student as if no delay had happened.

Aside from another minor student incident in which Mr. Turkentine simply said, "Elvira Entwhistle, I said not to peek in the bowl!", the rest of the paperclip drawings proceeded as normally.

Finally, he set the bowl back on his desk and picked up the chalk again. "We are now going to start calculating the probability of picking each color. Terence Roper, when you took your paperclip out of that bowl, what color did you happen to select?"

"Red," the student replied.

"I see. How many others grabbed a red paperclip?"

Five hands went up. Mr. Turkentine continued from this. "If you selected a paperclip at random from this bowl, you would be highly likely to pick a…" He glanced into the bowl to double-check. "…red one more than the rest, it seems. Now, since common denominators tend to increase the higher a number is, I can't figure out how to simplify the fractions of such a high number of what was in the bowl, so let's pretend that we had fifteen paperclips total. Six of those drawn were red, so the probability of picking one would be six out of fifteen—or, in its simplest form, two out of five—hence highly probable." He wrote the ratio 6:15 on the board, also adding the simplified equivalent.

"The other colors were a bit lesser in quantity. Madeline Durkin, which color was yours?"

"Blue."

"Okay. By a show of hands, how many others got blue?"

Only two other hands went up.

"Okay, then," Mr. Turkentine responded, writing the mathematical equivalents on the board. "From that data, I gather that the probability of picking a blue paperclip would be three out of fifteen, or, in simplest form, one out of five. Not a good outcome." In actuality, there were lots more blue paperclips in the stash, but they had settled near the bottom of the bowl.

"Wilbur Rice, what was your color?"

"Green."

Upon the revelation that Wilbur was the only one with a green paperclip, Mr. Turkentine proceeded to explain that one out of fifteen was a very improbable chance indeed but was willing to chalk it up to bad luck on the class's part, as lots of greens had been pooled in the bowl.

"Okay. Tess Foster?"

"Purple."

Four classmates total had picked that one. Mr. Turkentine went on to call that a "somewhat likely" event, as four out of fifteen was close to six out of fifteen, which only confused everybody.

"Okay! So, that leaves one last pick…Charlie Bucket?"

Charlie still could not get Violet's blueberry form out of his head since seeing that bowl that shared too many similarities. Distractedly, he answered, "Blue."

"What do you mean, you got a blue one? Why didn't you raise your hand when I asked about it?" Mr. Turkentine proceeded to turn back to the chalkboard, annoyed. "Fine. I guess I'll now have to un-simplify the one-fifths probability ratio, and—"

"I'm sorry, Mr. Turkentine. I misspoke," Charlie recovered. "My paperclip is gold."

"Oh, well, now that makes much more sense!" Mr. Turkentine replied, relieved. "This really beats the odds, too! Last I remember, I had only five gold ones in that collection!"

Now relieved, he turned back to the chalkboard to write the ratio and to gesture to the others that had been written. "Okay, so, by default, this would make it a one out of fifteen chance that you would pick a gold paperclip at random, which makes it only look like it has the same chance of getting picked as a green paperclip, which I certainly know is not true from the overall distribution from my collection, but what the heck. Now, after gathering all of the data, we find the final probable outcome by turning each ratio into a percentage. I'm sure you all recall this from late September."

Mr. Turkentine approached the bare side of the chalkboard and wrote the giant percentage sign. "Now, fifteen has the misfortune of not being divisible by one hundred, but on the seven-point grading scale, the number is easily calculated by subtracting a letter grade for each wrong answer down to an F, so if we count down from there…" He proceeded to write applicable numbers.

Charlie had had too many awkward thoughts triggered by events from this morning's lesson alone. Never before had he been so looking forward to lunch break to get out a measly slice of bread with a tiny cup of margarine in privacy.

A/N: Most of the mentioned names of Charlie's classmates were one big trivia reference. Does anyone know what it is?