"It's all in the gloves, actually. I insist on being fireproof at all times." Mr. Wonka says, hopping down after him.

This brilliantly white corridor is much narrower and more bare than the grand thoroughfares of the factory. Mr. Wonka leads them down several tricky and twisty passages, across a catwalk spanning a vat of fragrant bubblegum-pink slime, and down a cramped metal stairwell.

Finally, they veer into a cordoned-off side passage which is garlanded with bumblebee-striped streamers and bedecked with cheerful neon-yellow signs and furnished with attractive traffic barriers every few paces. Mr. Wonka gleefully steps around these without breaking speed.

Kevin gets distracted by the cat of pink slime but drags himself away and keeps going. Does he have time to read the signs? It's not that he's going to heed the warnings or anything; he just wants to know what they're warning against.

The signs convey no useful information, just increasingly impolite kibbitzing about their current plan of action.

TRANSPORT OUT OF SERVICE

NO ENTRANCE

DEAD END

WRONG WAY

EMPLOYEES ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT

ABSOLUTELY NO ONE BEYOND THIS POINT

CONDEMNED (THIS MEANS YOU)

WOE BETIDE YE WHO TRESPASS HERE

HAVE IT YOUR WAY THEN

WONKA NO

And sure enough, there it sits in the lobby at the end of the corridor, its glass doors stuck ominously in the open position. Its every surface is covered in gleaming push-buttons—not just all the walls, but the floor and ceiling as well. And there's one final blazing yellow sign, this one alleging that this beautiful, miraculous machine is "OUT OF ORDER".

As a consequence of Mr Wonka's extraordinary genius, he had never met a system so complex that he couldn't hold every part of it in his brain at once. Naturally, this meant that every large system he built himself tended to mean absolute hopscotching gibberish to anyone else, because he simply had zero survival instinct for simplicity.

The Great Glass Elevator had been temperamental ever since Mr. Wonka's project to make it show up before you pushed the button to call it, and to bring you to your destination earlier than you had even left. This had been back in March, and after several Oompa-Loompas had gotten horribly lost somewhere in mid February, they had declared it entirely unsuitable. Mr. Wonka, however, found it "a perfectly expedient, if headstrong, mode of conveyance" and thought nothing more about it.

He had assumed the Oompa-Loompas would tinker with it if it bothered them. But what he hadn't appreciated until that very morning is that the Oompa-Loompas were entirely incapable of remediating the frankly perverse and arcane engineering abuses he had visited upon the machine in order to contort it into its current mode of functioning. They lacked his head for systems or, what is more likely, his diabolical willingness to commit any heinous kludge whatsoever to bend the machine to his will.

Anyways, the point is it was an ingenious, shiny death trap. Like so much else in the factory. And, as Mr. Wonka would have it, like most fun things that are worth trying.

"If it's OUT of order," Mr. Wonka is just now explaining, "we'll just have to top it off with some more order." And he pulls open a chamber in the side of the lift. "Let me see..."

He nimbly searches his various pockets. No to the rubber fried egg and the snake-in-a-can. Yes to the (unshuffled) deck of playing cards, which he tosses into the chamber.

Ooh, a squashy cellophane bag of toffees. "My delectable dialect-ical tongue-toffees! Fluently understand and speak any language whatsoever! It'd change the world tomorrow if only I knew how to manage the strix visitations. Nonetheless!" And he places them back carefully into his coat pocket.

In goes a shiny medal award with a crown on it. In goes a handwritten signed receipt for 800 tonnes each of jelly beans, jumping beans, and has-beans. Finally, he bellows into the chute, "GENTLEMEN, READY. AIM. FIRE."

With that, orders have been restored. It is time to leave. Will Kevin be coming along? He can have the honour of pressing the shiny black button labelled Bon-Bon Voyage, which is down there at around knee height for him.