"Regarding little Mike Teavee

We very much regret that we

Shall simply have to wait and see

If we can get him back his height

But if we can't it serves him right."

...

Because it was the first of August, and because the first-of-the-month had been the same every month for the past few years, Mike was not surprised, when he finally had to leave his bedroom for the sake of body functions, to find a large cardboard box waiting for him in the hallway.

Lifetime supply. Yeah, thanks a lot.

Mike hated chocolate, his dad was allergic, and his mom had lost her taste for it (or at least for Wonka's stuff) after The Incident, but the boxes still came, month by month. As promised.

His parents had had the brilliant idea that it would be Mike's responsibility to hand-donate each box to the local preschool, since they were looking for every opportunity to make him leave the house. Apparently, something of what Wonka's slaves had been preaching about had hit home for Mr. Teavee, and he had won over Mrs. Teavee as well. Typical. But they couldn't make him go anywhere; right now, they were both teaching summer school, and when they got home, they would be preparing for the regular school year.

They had both learned not to try to take away his computer or his video games, not to do any of that Parent Stuff, because he could be a disciplinary nightmare when he wanted to be, and they just didn't have the time for that. So, they were resigned to his reclusiveness, so long as he didn't openly defy them. Which meant that he kept the boxes hidden under his bed until the school year started up again, at which point he had to leave the house (It was that or waste his time in truancy court.), and then he just threw them away en route to the school building.

Like he was going to present himself in public unnecessarily. Five and a half years ago, he had left home for what was at best supposed to be a boring tour (resulting from his need to prove that he was the best hacker in the entire world, which he had) and at worst supposed to be a boring parade of whimsy thinly veiling a middle aged man's need for attention. And he had come home seven feet tall and in need of a dietary coach.

Because Wonka and his slaves had had a secret plan to enforce their own morals on a group of children through physical violence.

Sure, Wonka had paid for his medical attention, his recovery to a comparatively normal size. (At least, Charlie Bucket had done so, using Wonka's stationery and bank account.) But they couldn't exactly un-stretch his entire freaking body; they could only give him back surgery to bring him back to a human-ish height, and skin cream to deal with the stretch marks, and a meal plan to make sure he wasn't so flat anymore.

Mike had changed schools (and skipped two grades, while he was at it; he had always been too smart for those rugrats anyway), changed all of his online usernames, but Wonka's work was done and impossible to take back.

Even five and a half years after Golden-Ticket-Gate, the news and the Internet still somehow cared about the five winners. Cared so much that they made Mike care. They made Mike keep track. They made Mike use up tabs…screw that, use up entire windows, use up an entire laptop, following the progress of his kindred suckers.

He was privy to every news article updating the curious public on Augustus's diet.

Apparently, Mrs. Gloop, like Mike's own mother, was over candy now; she made a whole big tearful deal (to half a million cameras) about how important it was to her that Augustus be healthy, how important it was that all the children of the world be healthy, and how Wonka was an evil man for selling chocolate in the first place, and something something fruits and vegetables count your calories. Mr. Gloop, the butcher, seemed at most lukewarm to the whole thing.

Augustus, though, was built now. He was before-and-after-picture-gold. There were even articles about him called "From Chunk to Hunk". Articles. Plural. As in more than one journalist got paid to make that pun. And were proud enough of it to keep their names on it.

Every article congratulated Augustus on his diet, and on his humanitarian efforts (donating his lifetime supply of chocolate to the less fortunate). Mike wondered if they just…didn't see that Augustus wasn't really smiling anymore. He wasn't babbling in interviews, listing every flavor that had ever been in a chocolate bar ever. The passion wasn't there anymore. Someone had to notice; Mike had never even spoken to Augustus, and he noticed.

Not that Mike pitied him; he was the idiot who trusted food to be able to consistently fill the holes in his life.

Then there was Veruca, who, in the factory, had mostly struck Mike as obnoxious, with her shrill demands, and cleverer than anyone gave her credit for ("Maybe you could put her in a county fair," she had said of Violet, to Mrs. Beauregarde's face. Mike had almost laughed.).

Despite the fact that Mr. Salt never said anything about his daughter and Veruca rarely said anything about her parents, it was clear that they had had a falling out. Every time Veruca was sighted (and yes, they used the word "sighted"), it was in some foreign country, attending some wild party or participating in some dangerous stunt. The press ate it up: the spoiled rich girl gone rogue. And if anything, Veruca's smile was more real now than ever; whenever she was photographed, the thrill of adventure was in her eyes. None of that practiced, boarding school smile from before.

The jokes were predictable and dry. "I guess she finally snapped." "I just wonder who's feeding all of her pets." And when she conceded to being interviewed, Veruca went right along with them. "The servants are, I suppose," she would drawl, still slightly out of breath from whatever they had caught her doing. She was a good sport about the not-completely-lighthearted ribbing at her expense; she knew that she was rich, and she knew that she was spoiled, and she knew that everything she did, said, and thought was colored by those things. "Do you really blame me for wanting to try the dive myself?" she asked once, dusting herself off and shrugging out of her parachute. "I got to fall down Wonka's garbage funnel! It was great fun."

She was a good sport, that is, until she thought something was unfair. Until someone accused her of outlandish substance abuse, or assumed aloud that she engaged in lewd behaviors. Then her lips would purse up in that same way, and she was Veruca Salt, the little brute, again, red-faced and indignant. Because what she did in public was for the public, but what was private belonged to her, and she let no one forget that even for a moment.

Since neither she nor her parents spoke on what split them up, Mike took it upon himself to assume that Mr. Salt stopped giving her whatever she wanted and Veruca decided that Life would withhold nothing from her.

It was always exciting to see an update on Veruca; each time, it was like a tiny installment of some adventure series.

Violet Beauregarde's life was more of a dramatic saga.

First, it had been suing her mother when the woman tried to force her into cosmetic surgery. Apparently, Violet liked being blue, or at least she didn't mind it. Then, she had sued Wonka for turning her blue in the first place. (Again, Mike was pretty sure it had been Charlie who convinced Wonka to just pay her the money without making a full case of it.) Then, while she was on a roll, Violet decided to enter the Olympics. And she won. Twice. And now, whenever an interviewer brought up Violet's trip to the factory, he or she was promptly spoken over: "I'm a two-times gold medalist. I'm a world champion. We're not going to make this about a contest I won when I was eleven."

It was probably her self-confidence and the fact that she was the only other person to have been physically marked by the goings on in the factory that made Mike so interested in Violet Beauregarde. She was blue, and she chose to stay blue, although she dyed her hair purple.

Mike supposed that it could be argued that he was sort of stalking her. But not really. He didn't have access to any pictures of her that the general public didn't have access to. The most he ever did to alter her life was delete her personal information from risky websites. That was something most people paid money for. And he couldn't help it if he was technologically gifted enough that he could stumble across things like her social security number and her Internet history by accident. By accident!

But that was why he had a separate laptop for his Golden Five research.