Q and Eliot fart around NYC going to parties and wondering how all the muggles can stand to live such an uncharmed life and OH MY GOD DO SOMETHING.

Also they’re alcoholics now, even more so than before, because…ya know… Edgy, I guess.

There’s a new character named Richard, he was Eliot and Janet and Josh’s friend before Alice and Q joined the group. He’s Christian. This sparks off several pages of faffing about God and magic which imparts nothing new to anyone who has spent more than .02 seconds thinking about theology.

Also Q suddenly wants to bone Janet. Yeah, it really is that out of the blue. Also, he doesn’t know why, but he presumes it’s because he’s bored.

JFC, Q, pick up a hobby. I happen to know the Catskills have some excellent hiking spots.

After a debauched night of partying, Penny shows up. Just….randomly.

Penny, why aren’t you at school? Ah, okay, Penny tells everyone his story and it starts that he dropped out after his Fourth Year. (so…two months ago) He moved to a small town in Maine and started researching. Researching what? Fuck you, just researching. But he found himself lonely and so he, in proper magician fashion, decided to fix this with clubs and heavy drinking. Because, of course, what else is there? Certainly no small-town close-knit community nothing, psh, that’s not proper for our Dark and Edgy tale. (Also, c’mon, overly-excited mowhawk wannabe-magician living alone in a farmhouse in small town Maine? This has cozy mystery all over it. Give him an adopted grandmother a couple dead bodies, I’m begging you.)

But instead he runs into the traveling salesman, Lovelady.

Lovelady depended heavily for his livelihood on luck and the gullibility of strangers.

Oh, hey, so there are people in this universe who need an income.

They’re just the sad, disreputable ones. Fuck you, book.

So Lovelady has some weird things happen to him and surmises that he’s found something of actual power and some force out there wants it. He “ crossed the Atlantic to throw himself on the already overtaxed mercy of Brakebills. ” Oh, so when it comes to giving every graduate a trust fund from their ‘magically enhanced’ (aka fraudulent) investing, that’s fine, but help some blue-collar shlub and suddenly their overtaxed.

Eat the fucking rich.

In this passage Lovelady is also called ‘greedy’ and ‘avaricious’ even though his life in London was explicitly called out as poor. He won’t get rid of his wares even though something in them is dangerous, but also his wares are the only thing keeping him fed and functioning, and thus he is “ greedy scrimping.”

I cannot with how much I fucking hate this shit fucking book, the wealth privilege is just oozing out of this pile of mess.

Anyway, Lovelady can’t find Brakebills so he hares off to Maine and that’s where he meets up with Penny. They determine that the magical item is a button, and Penny buys it off him for $80,000.

Which he got from………….????????????????

The button is an artifact from the Fillory books. There were five in the books, and a magic button takes you to an in-between land from which you can travel to alternate dimensions by stepping into one of an infinite number of fountains. When everyone else is like “but those are just books,” Penny counters that the mechanics are probably real because he’s BEEN to the in-between place.

That was Penny’s special Discipline, the travel thing. He worked on it one-on-one with one of the professors.

However, Penny can only get to the transional world (the Neitherlands) and he thinks the button could help him get to an end destination and he wants the others to help. Why he goes to them and not the professor that was helping him for three years, I have no idea. Pretty sure the book doesn’t, either. Q is the main character, so Penny went there.

Q tries to argue that Penny is grasping at straws, trying to make Fillory real, but…um….???? Nothing Penny has said is beyond what’s reasonable from what he’s personally observed? He even said he thinks the books have fictional narratives and it’s only the travel and magic and stuff that’s real, albeit told incorrectly through the eyes of a muggle. And he’s personally been to an alternate dimension that fits with that theory. He’s made a perfectly reasonable hypothesis and, more importantly, wants to test it.

But Quentin “Black Pill” Coldwater says no.

Fortunately Alice is not so defeatist and just grabs the button and she, Q, and Penny all wind up in the Neitherlands.