The first thing the two would notice as they walked was the sound of ice cracking beneath their feet. The Cold Wave created a layer of frost on the ground that made the terrain both slippery as well as annoyingly loud. Regardless Domic took out the map, getting their location and giving Cat directions as they continued onward. Everywhere they went they could see how the Cold Wave had affected the area, some locations hit harder than others. Some spots were relatively untouched aside from a sheen of frost, while others were practically frozen in ice. Only the sound of their foot steps and the faint noise of the surface winds in the distance could be heard as they moved from the service tunnels back into the open metro.

It was here that Cat and Domic would come across a ghastly sight. It looked like four people who were too late to escape the Cold Wave, frozen as they ran. Two were on the ground, broken from their knee down. [color=firebrick]"Poor, poor bastards."[/color] However Cat would notice something off about them. They didn't wear nearly enough clothing on them to be scouts or scavengers. They wore ragged clothes that wouldn't even keep them warm inside a closed room, let alone the metro. And they didn't have any bags either. Near them were some pipes and rebar they were presumably using for weapons, but they were barely weaponized in any way, more or less just pulled from the ground. Being an experienced solider she would know who these people are: Ghouls.

In this frozen apocalypse, mutations brought about from radiation and other strange sources were common. Indeed, many are even born with mutations due to tainted water or mutations from the mother. But for the most part everyone is human. Except those who have the misfortune of being exposed to radiation in such high quantities that, instead of simply dying from it, they've become terrible husk of themselves. Ghouls are human only in shape, driven to some sort of bestial madness that makes them violent, yet at the same time their mutations have made them inhumanly tough, capable of shrugging off wounds that would cripple a normal person and even survive harsh weather conditions. There said to even be people crazy enough to willingly get mutated, gambling on the chance of their mutations being benign instead of killing them or driving them insane. Though obviously even those mutations had their limits, such as these frozen ghouls.