"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 vat 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.

This is absolutely mcfreaking bonkers but at least the buttons in the floor are recessed so he can walk into the elevator without pushing six of them.

You bet he's coming along! Button Poke!

As anyone who has operated a defective telephone-charging cable knows, jiggling a faulty circuit can sometimes make it work again. You sit there bending and fiddling, and suddenly—the spark of life!

Magic, it turns out, works on much the same principle.

So Kevin pokes the button for Bon-bon Voyage, the pokèd button closes a tiny loop, and some unseen force jiggles into alignment. Suddenly the world bursts, once again, into technicolor glory. Stepping out beyond one's gate with boots on — soaring to a place out of time — the sights and smells of distant shores.

The threads of fate, which as you know have been hanging slack around the Elevator's occupants all the while, snap taut and begin to tighten. And tighten! And tighten still further! There is a vague ontological creaking as reality distends to the very limits of imagination—like taffy pulled apart until it is ready to snap. Something has got to give!

Something does!

*WONK!*

There is nothing 

And then there is everything 

And then there is sunlight streaming into the unshafted elevator, and the sound of birds chirping and the wind in the trees.

"Is this part of the factory? It doesn't look like part of the factory."

Mr. Wonka's face turns alertly every which way. "Any fool could tell you that it must be, logically speaking." he says thoughtfully. "However, being rather well-travelled and also not a fool, I suspect we are actually somewhere subtropical— perhaps Alpharetta, Lemuria, or Argentina."

He releases the elevator doors and dashes out. He simply must have a look around.

They're just off to one side of a little trail running through the woods. It's clearly an old-growth forest; many of the trees (mostly deciduous-looking, with rough bark and broad diamond-shaped leaves) are too big for even Wonka to get his arms around. The ground is underbrush over fallen leaves over thick dark topsoil. It smells like damp moss and the slow passage of time.

What a neat place! Kevin starts trying to climb a tree.

Mr. Wonka, on the other hand, begins examining the local flora at ground level—crouching down to look, gently inspecting leaves and flowers, moss and stems. His botanist senses are tingling—rich soil suggests biodiversity which suggests potential sources of new ingredients. Also perhaps a clue to their current whereabouts.

Does he know this place? Will he see anything he recognizes—or better yet, doesn't? He has a feeling that Kevin will be interested in his findings in either case.

Some of the plants are familiar; some are decidedly not! There's bamboo; that might be an unusually tall and skinny Japanese maple. There are mosses with blue-tinged tendrils and shrubs with heptagonal leaves and a creeping vine that zigzags back and forth up a tree trunk at oddly sharp and regular angles.

The tree Kevin is climbing contains a weird bug! It's bigger than his head!

"Woah!"

It's as surprised to see him has he is to see it! It says "Parasparasparas!" and snaps its claws at him.

Kevin absconds (downward, at about 9.2 meters per second squared minus air resistance) and lands on his butt. "There are ENORMOUS bugs here!"

Enormous bugs, you say? An island effect, perhaps. Or even…well, Mr. Wonka would like to judge the size of the bug himself.

So he'll stop trying to rank which of these lovely exotic plants he wants to sample a small and ideally non-lethal amount of first, and instead try to see if he can spot this bug. That is, if it hasn't flown off somewhere.

It skitters around the tree trunk and comes into view of Wonka, eyeing them both curiously with its giant bug eyes. "Par?"

Oh, it's…beautiful? That shiny segmented form, the gently working mandibles, and of course those enormous limpid eyes.

It also, yes, immediately makes his personal list of largest (?)bugs.

Although he is quite keen to inspect it more closely, those pincers do look a little businesslike. So he will perhaps use a stick to gently evaluate the creature's current disposition and level of interest in interspecies diplomacy.

Now that it's no longer surprising him in a tree, it's a really neat bug! Buzz would be so jealous. 

It pinches the stick. The stick breaks.

"What does a bug that big even eat? Smaller bugs? Plants?"