Errr, woods? If Mel was near enough to the center of the wave to be turned fully into a creature, he was close to the city's center, and probably far from any forests. It could be fixed, probably, with just saying they were in an alleyway shadow or something...
Also, could the next wave of posts possibly have some characters actually meeting up? The idea was that you take care of all this isolation stuff in the character sheet's history, and maybe a tiny flashback/summary at the beginning of your first IC post if absolutely necessary, and then the RP starts when people start to meet up...my post was set up so that maybe some people would come by looking for water and meet Raerin.