Okay, maybe not hell. How spectacular?

Really really spectacular. Those giant trees are all kinds of cool colors on top. The car birds are swooping around. The sun is bright and white and throwing rainbows. There's the river, back there, and there's where it lets out into the ocean, and there's something gracefully fuckoff huge heaving itself out of the ocean and splashing down.

Wow. Okay this is really something.

And unless some evil psion got ahold of him and is generating these, he's probably not on Earth anymore.

He sits down on the grass, dizzily, and buries his face on his knees and tries to control his breathing, which only causes him to hyperventilate more, so he squints his eyes shut and waits. How is he alive, how is he breathing, are things here even edible, what the fuck is going on, he doesn't think his internal narration has ever contained so much uncensored swearing even when he was living with Tobias, but what the fuck.

The gorgeous landscape and the megafauna have no explanations for him.

No, of course not.

He takes a few more minutes (probably minutes) to compose himself, takes in one more shuddering breath, then raises his head to inspect his surroundings, now that he's technically not in the thickest of the jungle anymore.

Jungle in most directions. Ocean over there, mountains a long way that way.

Is there less wet wood with which he can make a fire here? Or at least a place where wood is sufficiently spaced apart so he can just do uncontrolled set-things-on-fire magery and expect it to only hit one target?

Nope! It looks recently rained on everywhere, and while the trees are spaced out compared to Earth jungles they're not that far apart.

Ugh fine he'll start a fire there. Grumbling a bit, but alright.

He gets some of the wet wood and a knife and starts stripping it of wet bark, unless this world's wood is much more porous than Earth's he should be able to get rid of most of the wet parts like that.

It is really dense wood, actually. Kinda hard on his knife.

It's not a bad knife, though, he lived in the woods for two years, he made sure to research how to live there more effectively as soon as he returned to civilization. Cut cut cut, now the wood is dry, now it is on fire, and now he starts drying some more wood with the fire.

The laws of physics work as normal.

The megafauna give him a wide berth when there's a fire.

Good.

So he sets his tent up there after he has a proper fire going, and proceeds to strip naked and hang his sodden clothes close enough to the fire that they'll dry. He fusses inside his huge backpack and finds a change of clothes there and puts those on, and then—

—stops to think. He's not sure the animals there are, in fact, edible. He has some ration bars but not a whole lot of them, so he will in fact need to kill things to eat. And berries are probably more likely to be poisonous—or, at least, he's less likely to recognize non-poisonous ones—so he should probably limit to killing things.

Okay. He gets up after he's dry enough and—

—actually, he has another idea. He ages himself up. Not a lot, he hasn't focused on that at all, but he did do it a bit all those months ago with Jackson, on the ill-fated night when they met Mason, he can do it a little bit better now, and he might be biologically eighteen-or-nineteen instead of almost-seventeen. Some more muscle, constitution, whatever, it's better to be an adult than a teenager.

Now he goes out looking for large deerthings.

Deerthings seem to range from "large" to "mindbogglingly huge". Here is one browsing on a vine winding up a tree. It noses at him when he approaches.

Ugh they're kinda cute.

He closes his eyes, waits until the thing isn't right on top of him, then pushes the same thing that killed his mom at it.

The deerthing is big and tough enough to let out an earsplitting noise and charge off and carome into a tree before it collapses, dead.

Sigh.

He probably can't carry all of it up, but he could try to cut some of its meat off.

There is definitely no way he can pick this up without spending five years meditating on telekinesis.

The meat is... weird looking... but meaty.

Well of course it's weird looking who knows what selective pressures this thing was under.

Who knows what galaxy he's in. Gods. He'll try to pay attention to the stars and see if he can conclude anything, tonight.

He knows how to make dried meat, but that takes time, and he just wants some food for lunch and, perhaps, dinner today. He feels like it's a huge waste to kill the thing and get so little meat, relative to its size, but he's running on the hypothesis (hope) that he's there for limited time. Up he goes with the meat.

It's actually delicious.

Well that's surprising. Pleasantly so, of course, but he wouldn't have expected alien meat to be this good. Yum!

Okay, his clothes are probably dry again by now, so he puts them back into his backpack, and stays there for a while, thinking. He should probably go look for the cave that brought him there at some point, but the ground is still wet and he's unlikely to make much progress in it. He decides he'll wait, maybe until the following day, before doing that. He grabs one of the two books he brought and starts reading.

It starts raining again that afternoon. Not a huge storm, but rain.

The rain is neither strong enough to put out his fire nor to go through his tent, but it is quite enough to dampen his mood.

The rain is not charmed by this pun, being rain.

Well he has to keep himself amused, doesn't he, otherwise he'll just die of boredom.

Read read read he should maybe have brought more than just two books except he hadn't expected to end up in another planet.