Cute smiling friend!!! Who's helping her get to the city!!! And who Sable's probably planning to do Things with that will make her blush!!!

None of this really reduces the amount of Ruby Bouncing going on here.

Well then they will have a very happy bouncy time getting to Diran's.

A distant hazy shimmer rapidly becomes a genuine oasis with scraggly grass and scraggly shrubs and scraggly little trees and a great big tent that looks like it belongs with a circus and possibly wants to be a palace when it grows up. Seriously, the thing is massive. And decorated with lots of embroidery and colourful tassels and cords and things. It's a lot.

Next to the tent you could almost miss the person sitting out front, tending a couple of skewered lizards over a small campfire. She appears to be wearing long gloves and tall boots of the same stuff as Torok's armor, and has a pair of orange cat ears swiveling atop her head, slightly camouflaged amid her long red hair. The matching tail stands out much more starkly against her knee-length white skirt.

Ruby bounces happily up to the catgirl. Is it okay to call her a catgirl? It wasn't okay to call Blake a catgirl but this isn't Remnant and discrimination against Faunus isn't a thing here so she's calling her a catgirl in her head, at least for now.

"Hi you must be Diran your tent is so big and elaborate and pretty and your ears are pretty too hi!"

"...hello, stranger. Hi, Torok."

Up close it becomes clearer that the chitin on her arms and legs isn't detachable; it's part of her body.

"Diran, this is Ruby. We're travelling to the city together. Can we stop for lunch? We brought vegetables."

"Sure," Diran says agreeably. "I'll share my lizards if you share whatever you've got."

She nods cheerfully. "Definitely! I've never had lizard before! We've got onions, potatoes, carrots, and yams."

"Ooh, I bet we could chop up some carrots and potatoes and roast 'em on skewers just like the lizards."

Well, then Ruby will eagerly pull out two potatoes and two carrots and set to chopping once she finds a cutting board.

Diran can provide a piece of wood which is not totally unlike a cutting board, in that it is pretty clean and mostly flat. It'll work, anyway.

"So, the city," she says. "Any particular reason?"

"I'm a buildy, tinkery type of girl, and I'm an outworlder who landed here without my tools. City's the best place to get some, and to find work that uses my skills."

Chop chop chop.

"Fair 'nough." As Ruby produces chopped vegetables, Diran skewers them on long sticks and sets them over the fire next to the lizards. "Good luck. If you pick me up a book or two in the city, I'll pay you back for 'em, if they're not too expensive."

"You say that like a couple of outworlders have any idea what 'too expensive' adds up to."

"Not more than fifty gems all told, how about."

"Sure! If I can't manage to make at least a few books worth of spare money while I'm in the city, I don't deserve to call myself an engineer."

Soon enough all the vegetables are chopped and over the fire.

"Any books in particular you're after?"

"Just something to read that I haven't already read forty times. Travel journals, folk tales, adventure stories, whatever. I'll even take a history book if it's funny or exciting."

She pulls their notebook out and adds a note:

Books for Diran in the Oasis: travel journals, folk talks, adventure stories, or anything else entertaining/funny/exciting

"Will do!"

"Aww, you wrote it down!" she says, delighted.

"Pretty smart of you, we might not have remembered it exactly otherwise."

She nods and grins sheepishly. "W—Too forgetful otherwise."

Almost let a "we" slip there.

"You know, Torok, for a guy as weird and kind of suspicious as you, you've got all-right taste in friends."

"Thanks, I think."