The Candyman's Education

Disclaimer: I don’t own Willy Wonka or Prince Pondicherry, nor is the setting or background entirely mine. I’m just expanding on a part of Wonka’s history mentioned in passing in the movie. However, if anyone wants to give me Johnny Depp for my birthday, I won't argue *grin*

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Willy Wonka was nineteen years old. For the most part, adolescence had been kind to him once he’d gotten his braces and related headgear removed, leaving in its wake a tall young man who was admittedly on the thin side but full of energy and ideas – most of his energy came from chocolate, and likewise most of his ideas were about chocolate. He was largely considered handsome by those who had seen him in his little corner candy shop and at the opening of his huge factory, but the sheaves of fan-mail he’d received in the last year, doused in perfume and/or professing the writer’s eternal love for and desire to marry Willy, was largely met with anything from amusement to confusion (or in the case of the fan who sent Willy an eighteen-inch dildo a week for over a year, a restraining order).

The truth of the matter was, despite the fact that he was already widely traveled (thirteen countries by the time he was sixteen) and well-educated (he could speak five languages fluently), there was one very significant blank spot in his mental repertoire: he was a virgin. He was mentally and physically innocent in that regard, and he simply had never thought to ask anyone about it (and if the truth be told no one would have had the heart to explain things to him). But he had no time for such matters; Prince Pondicherry of India had sent him a letter requesting a very special project be built for him – a full-scale palace made entirely out of chocolate.

India! He’d never been to India before, mainly traveling within Europe to the primary chocolate centers of the world. And an entire palace of chocolate! It would be his biggest project by far, especially considering that *everything* would have to be chocolate – the bricks, the mortar, the statues, the furniture…

But Prince Pondicherry’s proposed reward scared him, just a little. His Highness had many wives, and flocks of concubines, and he’d decided that he could spare one for his guest “so that you are relaxed and can allow the creative juices to flow.” That didn’t make much sense to Willy, as he planned to be designing and overseeing the construction while he was in India, and the poor girl would certainly be bored to tears. He planned to negotiate this with the Prince once he’d arrived.

It was a good thing, then, that he was traveling by ship (besides the fact that he didn’t like being cooped up in an airplane), since the few days before he arrived gave him time to jot down a few preliminary designs and formulate his arguments (his polite, humble, eternally respectful arguments) to Prince Pondicherry.