Unceremoniously, a lot of the remaining candy got dumped into a communal gunny-sack so that their boxes and packages could be used to store magic seeds and fruits. As Applejack grabbed a brown box tied with a blue ribbon, Wonka plucked it out of her teeth and tucked it into his waistcoat.
“Not this one, Applejack my dear; I have a feeling we'll be needing this for later,” Wonka said.
What followed was a lightning orchard tour as the ponies and human zipped from tree to tree and stuffed their produce away in the elevator. Twilight weaved magic around the scratch marks left by Chalco'Zok to mitigate against further harm, and gave fruit-handling precautions from her book as necessary. Applejack got a shock from a Rawkberry, Wonka ended up with a few Parkaburrs stuck to his sleeve that wouldn't dislodge for anything, and Pinkie kept tasting things that proved inedible, but other than that they were able to secure seeds and fruits from every tree in the orchard only seconds before, faint upon the frozen mountain air, the sound of a heinous, resounding belch was heard.
“Right on schedule.” Wonka put away his golden pocket-watch and ushered everypony into the elevator. “All aboard, my Easter-colored equines! Time to soar with the eagles! The Fizzy Lifting Drinks have worn off!”
They'd sailed up and out of the ravine again and had just reached top speed back toward Equestria proper when they met Chalco'Zok again, descending a quarter mile away. Glowing purple pinpricks glinted in the gloom as the serpent raked the elevator with a wrathful gaze... and then he turned his head away and flew back toward the grove. It seemed that Wonka's predictions were about to come true.
Applejack gazed back and pressed a hoof against the side of the elevator, chiding herself for not being the one to think of going back for the seeds. Any minute now, that grove was going to be in ashes, and who knew what sort of trouble that dragon was going to get up to in retaliation. Everypony in the elevator was quiet – Wonka manually piloting and looking over the mountains with a thoughtful expression, Twilight working some more on the elevator's scratches, and Pinkie Pie sprawled on top of the gunny sack of candy, finally coming down off of her day-long sugar rush.
Applejack turned her head at the feeling of a hoof on her shoulder. “Maybe you shouldn't look,” Twilight said. “I can keep watch.”
“Aww, I'm all right, Tw-” Applejack squinted out the rear of the elevator. “What's up with them clouds?”
“Eh?” Twilight followed her gaze. The sun dropped below the horizon, and as the sky dulled to red and purple, the ponies could see that a large cloud bank hugging a few mountain peaks was developing a sort of “V” of clear air, almost as if it were being cut in half like a loaf of bread. The tip of this “V” was pointed right at them like an accusatory finger, and soon the clouds had been cleft in two. A blur skated over the darkening mountains.
“You don't think...?” Applejack croaked.
Twilight fished a spyglass out of her pack and peered out the window. The alicorn made a sound like a duck with bronchitis and turned to Wonka. “Wonka, we have to go fa-”
But it was too late. A sound like a roaring fire grew outside, and even as Applejack watched, a green blur shot up at them, so quickly that the eye could see naught but the places where it had been a few instants before.
“DOOODGE!” Applejack cried, too late, as Chalco'Zok the dragon launched up underneath the Great Glass elevator and snapped his jaws around its bottom. Candy elevator buttons flew off the walls as the dragon's fangs punched through the candy glass, and the inertia of his flight send them all rocketing skyward, slamming everypony to the floor.
“He wasn't this fast!” Pinkie Pie groaned atop her squashed bag of candy. “Why is he this fast?!”
Applejack looked nervously down into Chalco'Zok's gullet, his tongue lashing obscenely at the underside of the elevator. The walls creaked as cracks began forming around the bottom walls, snaking down to the floor. She was able to get a very good view of the wyrm's dentistry and, where before his teeth had been clean, now they were stained a weird shade of mulberry. Toward the back were twigs and mashed up seeds between his molars. “He wasn't headin' back to burn the orchard – he went and ate somethin' to make him fast enough to catch us! Speed seeds!”
Fighting against the extreme inertia, Wonka rose to his feet and swung the head of his cane up toward the elevator's ceiling, looping it through a hatch handle that he pulled down. Leather straps and hand-holds tumbled down from the top. As their ascent began to slow, Twilight's horn flashed and the boxes and bags of precious seeds bundled themselves together. A purple orb formed around them, which Twilight stuck to the ceiling like a wad of chewing gum. A loud CROKLE rang out as the floor of the elevator burst into a spiderweb of cracks, “Grab hold of the straps, my dears, and hold on tight!” Wonka cried. “This is about to get exciting!” Applejack found herself hoisted off the floor and into straps, one for each of her forehooves and a third within biting range. Pinkie had somehow managed to form hers into a snug-looking harness, and Twilight and Wonka were still scrambling into theirs when, just as the ascent of the elevator reached its apex, the dragon tore the bottom of the elevator off with a wrench of his sinuous neck, and gracefully spiraled downward amidst a shower of sugar glass.
Frozen air punched the wind out of everypony's lungs as Wonka, with one foot and his tucus in a leather strap, wrenched the manual controls forward again to speed away Equestria-wards. The ponies cried out involuntarily as the dagger-like mountain peaks menaced them far below like a hungry mouth of granite and ice.
“Rrgh!” Twilight cried, orienting herself horn-downwards. The elevator flashed with searing lavender light as the alicorn fired lasers with the unnering accuracy of a recreational mathematics enthusiast, but as before, the beams skittered and skated off of the dragon's scales as he almost lazily followed the elevator below, having no trouble keeping up even at top speed.
“Twilight!” Applejack cried. “Can't you just zap us back to Canterlot or somethin??”
The purple alicorn tapped her forehead with a hoof , staring at the dragon. “With all the different individual ponies and seeds and Wonka and elevator mechanisms, I'm not sure even I could pull that off under these circumstances, but...” Her gaze lit up! “But no! There's the Euclydesdean method of teleporting whole areas of space rather than targeting specific objects! I'm not as practiced with it, and it takes awhile to cast, but it could allow us to lose the dragon! “ The alicorn's horn began to glow.
Wonka's cane crossed her chest with a thwap. “'Notable talents are not necessarily connected with discretion!'” The human cried. “Look below my dear violet horse! Look closely at how the dragon flies!”
The ponies peered down at the dragon in the failing light. The serpent below was circling below the elevator as quickly as if somepony had strapped the beast to a giant propeller. Round, round, round round round he went, so fast that he sometimes seemed to almost be popping in and out of sight as the ponies' eyes lost track of him. Whirlwinds of snow and ice followed behind him as they flew.
“The dragon is still under the effects of the 'speed seeds,'” the candymaker explained. “If he were to see your magic spell, he might have the sense to fly up and smash the elevator in the blink of an eye, but fortunately for us he's making a game of our plight, waiting for us to fall so that he can gobble us out of the air like brownies. 'Bad pride is the deadly sin of superiority that reeks of conceit and arrogance.'”
“But if we're not teleporting, then what?!” Pinkie Pie said.
“Delivering!” Wonka said, taking out the brown box with blue ribbon he'd tucked into his coat. “I think these will solve our problem, but he'll be wary of any packages from the elevator after the Fizzy Lifting drinks, so I'll need to deliver this hidden away in my coat as he gobbles me up!”
“And then I can teleport you back up here!” Twilight shouted over the roar of the wind through the bottom of the elevator. “You'll need fireproofing too!”
“Yeah, but what if the dragon only, like... half eats you?!” Applejack interjected.
“And won't he see Twilight casting the spell? I thought that was a bad thing!” Pinkie Pie added. By this point, everypony was shivering as the bitter mountain air continued to howl inside the broken elevator, and a little icicle was forming on the end of Pinkie's mane.
“Not to worry, I've thought of everything!” Wonka said. “I've pushed the Glucomotor far beyond safe limits, and soon it will explode in a most wondrous fashion! When it does, Twilight must cast her fireproofing on me, and then I shall 'fall' out the elevator. The dragon shall miss our slight-of-horn entirely, and be so eager for his meal that he'll snap me up without hesitation!”
“Nopony answered my 'half eaten' question!” Applejack pressed. “And did you say 'explode?!'”
“But... Mr. Wonka, when sugar encounters high heat it melts, not explodes!” Twilight protested.
“Which is why I specifically made sure that it would explode,” Wonka explained, as if to a filly.
“I vote 'no' on blowin' up the elevator!” Applejack shouted. This was it. They'd signed on with a madman after all. She should have listened to her gut!
“Seconded!” Pinkie Pie said, eyes wide.
“Oh for heaven's sake!” The chocolatier shouted. “It's only the part of the elevator that allows us to move for- oh there it goes-”
A fifty-foot flare of red flames and sugar dust blew out from the top of the elevator, a cacophonous explosion starting avalanches on every peak around them as the Great Glass Elevator wobbled and rocked to a halt, a great burning cloud of fire hanging in the air behind them.
“I never got to start that experimental acre of lemons!” Applejack wailed. There was a minute-long second as the apple farmer opened her eyes, and saw Wonka's straps hanging empty. She looked to her right, seeing Twilight's horn flashing and burning with purple light, her eyes gaining arcane luminescence. Pinkie Pie was hugging her hooves to herself, all wrapped up in the straps and staring down through the bottom of the elevator anxiously. She looked down. Far below them was a blossom of flame, against which was framed a gangly man, top hat long lost to the fickle winds. He tucked his limbs into a cannonball, the dragon's jaws snapped through the fire, and he was eaten.