The journey from the office to the Inventing Room only took a few minutes via Areoscoot, and as soon as he arrived, Charlie was apprised of the situation by the chief Oompa Loompa of the room. As it turned out, while synthesizing crocodile tongues, a green bio-luminescent crystal-like substance that was gifted to Charlie by a mysterious man while out on a scouting mission for fantastical organisms, into a liquid, some of said liquid got on an Oompa Loompa's hand, causing it to grow. While the affected hand was now as big as a regular-sized human hand, the Oompa Loompa's hand was now bigger than his own head. The chief Oompa Loompa pleaded with Charlie to speak to Wonka to either get them better hazmat equipment or to consider shelving the project due to how dangerous working with the mysterious substance was. Charlie said he would discuss it with Wonka but made no promises either way, if there was something to be gained by studying the substance the workers in the Inventing Room would have to continue conducting experiments. This was the part of the job Charlie hated the most, telling others what to do, especially when the laborers stood against the task. He thought that years of watching Wonka order the Oompa Loompas to realize his dreams would rub off on him, but he was still that kind, considerate boy, even after all these years. Ironically, Charlie thought that if Veruca would have been the last Golden Ticket winner standing and became Wonka's heir, this would have been the part of the job she would have loved the most, barking orders and bossing people around. And the more he thought about it, the heir realized both of them only possessed one of two gifts needed to thrive while working at Wonka's factory, and opposing gifts at that; Veruca had the personality traits but not the temperament while Charlie had the temperament but not the personality traits.
If they would have worked together, perhaps one could have supplemented the area where the other was deficient in and made an interesting team along the way, but back in reality, it was up to Charlie to find a solution to the problem he faced. Perhaps he could get Wonka to discontinue the project, it would not have been the first time a promising invention had to be shelved. The life of an innovating confectioner included a lot of trial and error, mostly error, like the results of the large dismantled machine the Oompa Loompa's stored in the back of the Inventing Room. The machine which produced the Three Course Dinner Chewing Gum had long ago been taken out of commission when the Oompa Loompas, Wonka, and Charlie could not figure out a way to stop the chewer from turning into a blueberry. The project's expenses and the additional costs related to treating the gum's victims kept growing exponentially, and once there was no way for the product to become profitable, Wonka made the decision to terminate the project, something that didn't really bother him as he detested the texture of gum and the chewing sounds that accompanied it. Now, whenever one of the teams in the Inventing Room needed a specific part for a new machine, they would go to the old gum machine and strip it for whatever they needed, leaving only the outer husk and some internal gadgets remaining over a decade later.
As he walked around the black, steam-filled room full of gizmos and tables covered in Bunsen burners, retort flasks and Florence flasks to name a few, all the while black-clad Oompa Loompas maneuvered about transporting different chemicals and other materials to create the candies of the future, Charlie could only think about the greatest tragedy that occurred in this room. It was in this room during the tour that the uber-confident and downright cocky Violet Beauregarde went from being a future Olympian to a human blueberry in a matter of seconds. Each one of the Golden Ticket winners suffered a gruesome fate somewhere in the factory, giving rise to a tradition Charlie engaged in multiple times a week. Whenever he needed to clear his mind of something, Charlie would hop on his Areoscoot and visit the four rooms where the other contest winners were punished for their flaws. While it hardly came up in his mind, his family's house was just a few yards away from where the gluttonous Augustus Gloop fell headfirst into the chocolate river. The more Charlie thought about what happened to the chubby German kid, the more sinister the chocolate room felt, so he often preferred to block out that memory than to have to contemplate the truth about his neighborhood.
The Inventing Room was next on his journey, and he often ventured to this spot for official business, but also to cathartically relive the events of that fateful day. His next stop was actually much farther so instead of visiting the rooms in chronological order, after finishing up in the Inventing Room, Charlie decided to take a break from work, hopped back on his Areoscoot and took off for the former Television Room. It was just a few minutes until Charlie reached the spot where he was not just crowned the winner of the special prize, but also the room where he watched a human being get shrunk down to the size of a finger. When he entered this room, he always remembered to put on those bulky, white-framed and red-tinted goggles designed to protect the user from the blinding flashes of light that emanated out of the disintegrator as the process of what happened in the room had not changed much. It took Wonka a few more years after the tour to work out all the kinks of Television Chocolate, but by then the media landscape had already begun to change and it was up to Charlie to keep everything up with the times. By the time of the project's completion, the world had begun the transition from television to streaming and from boxes in the living room to phones in your pocket. Wonka, in true fashion, was stubborn when it came to researching wireless devices, he already thought TV was a waste of time, so he was not going to start cheering on an even easier way for people to become more idle.
It was only after Charlie begged Wonka to get with the times that the master chocolatier approved research and development of smartphones and tablets for business and personal use for factory employees, and that research eventually made its way down to the former Television Room. Nowadays, the Oompa Loompas stationed in this room build upon the science of Television Chocolate and adapted it to work on digital platforms. In conjunction with the Marketing Department, they had to condense their longer TV commercials into catchy five second clips so that the audience did not click on the Skip Ad link and not sample the product, and now they were working on solving the problem that comes along with delivering Wonka products though mediums of different sizes. The biggest headache for the Oompa Loompas in the former Television Room was figuring out a way to have someone using a smartphone, someone on a tablet and a laptop user all be able to pull out the same sized chocolate bar from their device of choice. With so much innovation happening in this one room, Wonka and Charlie attempted to rename the room the "Streaming Room" but that name never really caught on and an informal compromise was reached inside the factory by instead referring to the room as the "former Television Room."
There was one more stop on Charlie's pilgrimage, the infamous Nut Sorting Room, the spot where his reconnected acquaintance suffered a life-changing crisis. Unlike the other three rooms, the Nut Sorting Room did not undergo any significant changes following the tour all those years ago. Apart from new squirrels being added to the line after the older ones were retired, the location was still the same blue-and-white, swirled-floor, gated-off, squirrels-seated-about, garbage-chute-leading-to-the-incinerator room as before. It was only fitting that he saved this room for last, Charlie's encounter with Veruca gave him a glimpse into the reality the other Golden Ticket winner's lives after the tour of the factory instead of just what he imagined happened to them. The last he had seen of all of them was from above in the Great Glass Elevator with Wonka and Grandpa Joe beside him. He watched them all leave the factory having failed the secret test to become Wonka's heir and it was up to Charlie's mind to fill in the blanks from there on out. He always suspected that Mike and Violet left in the worst condition as they left the factory literally deformed; Violet would have to live with her blue skin forever and Mike could only hope puberty might bless him with muscle build up to make up for his ever-so-thin body. Augustus was a bit more ambiguous, but Wonka explained to Charlie that his time smeared in chocolate had left the confection stuck to his body, essentially casting a mold of chocolate around him. He most likely underwent countless surgeries to remove the stuff from his body after it began fusing to his skin, but even that could not be as bad as what the aforementioned two had to live with.
Looking back, Charlie thought Veruca had it the easiest out of all the other winners, all she needed to do was take a long, deep bath once she got home and then she could have gone back to her normal life. At worst, her mink coat had stewed in trash for so long she had to throw it out but compared to the others her pride would have literally hurt worse than her back. The heir thought the worst thing she had to endure was photographers snapping pictures of her and her father covered in trash, but that was before Charlie had met up with her as an adult and seen how she was living in the present day. Her excessive drinking was enough of a sign that she was suffering from some sort of emotional distress and the way she spoke at the bar made it sound as if there was a dynamic shift in her relationship with her father following the tour. So, while she exited the factory with only minor physical scratches and bruises, Veruca left the factory with scars on a psychological level, scars that are far more difficult to spot if you did not know to look for them.