by Narrator » Fri Jul 26, 2019 7:34 pm
TOSH
"Right, then! On with the tour!"
The first few stops on the tour were -- well, perhaps "nothing special" wasn't quite right for a mechanically-inclined person like Tosh. The engineering required to make this place work was baffling, with conveyor belts, cranes, and automated machines of all kinds working together in perfect harmony. It was cartoonish, sure, but it was still mechanical, and it almost -- almost, mind you -- made sense. Yes, friction and other forces would likely cause a place like this to need hundreds of hours of maintenance, but when it was working smoothly, it was quite the site to see, even if 'all' it was doing was baking food.
The next few rooms, however, things went from the literal to the more figurative.
"Alright, keep up, keep up, plenty to do and plenty to see.
On your left, you'll see our Dream Factory. Here's where we bubble only the finest ideas and ingredients up from the most mysterious parts of the subconscious, shaping them and molding them into the hopes and dreams of the entire society. As a fun fact, many of you might know that, back in the olden days, this was all organic -- plants growing and being picked. We still use and grow a wide variety of the finest natural ingredients to make these dreams and fantasies, but now we also use state-of-the-art science and ingredients to bring them to life. Come inside, where our scienticians will be happy to give you free samples of some of the latest and greatest concepts we're workshopping, fresh out of the ovens."
The Dream Factory was filled with people in labcoats and goggles -- including, Tosh might be pleased to see, a few versions of himself. Some of them were tending to Seussian plants, filled with glowing orbs of some kind. Others were carefully cracking them open and feeding them through tubes and pipettes, boiling them over bunson burners, or adding carefully selected additives, brought to them by cranes from the back wall. It all looked very technical.
The tour group would walk in through the door as the guide ushered them through, but Tosh would ALSO see, out of the corner of his eye, another cracked door. This one read "EMPLOYEES ONLY: Memory storage, Opinion Sorting, Administration".
Tosh could either stick with the tour, or go off on his own.
BRUCE
Bruce was unable to wriggle himself free and would slam into---and through-- the wall.
It didn't hurt nearly as much as it 'should', as this place worked on cartoon physics. Thus, rather than a concussion, Bruce simply left a Bruce-shaped hole in the wall as he the crane picked up speed.
Bruce found himself whizzing through the factory, over vats of bubbling chocolate, past taffy being stretched and folded and restretched, dough being pounded and molded by giant gloved hand-shaped machines, vast ovens radiating heat -- it all smelled delicious, but it would probably be safer to be on the other side of the glass, where workers controlled the levers and machines, rather than being shunted up, down and all around through the factory itself.
He was beginning to slow down, however, as the crane came close to bringing him to his (hopefully not) final destination.