Hailey looks around, then pats herself down and checks what she's carrying: robes, wand, currency, travel supplies?

This is an awfully scenic area, the mountains are pretty.

Everything is as arranged, yes.

Cheers.

She hoists her pack and considers. Cultivator types tend to travel faster than mortals, yeah? So there's a decent chance Lu Si Na and her master are further along the trail. On the other hand, maybe mortal walking speed is casual for them. Hard to say. She's expected to be able to keep up, so presumably they walk at mortal speed or it's something she can match with just a few spells.

'Course they might be in town, but it's midday, an hour or two past noon, so they've probably headed on.

Quickest thing to do is scout high.

She glances up into the sky, then vanishes with a sharp crack, reappearing high enough that she's got a great view and plenty of airtime.

Hello, not-quite-cultivator world. What can a witch see from the air?

The skies are impressively clear - a benefit of a pre-industrial world. There's a dense forest out past the village, sweeping out about as far as the eye can see, aside the weaving path of the road, dotted with a handful of little rest stops up the mountain and down the path there's a few tiny settlements out of easy view. It must be pretty remote, here, by the looks of things. 

It's hard to feel like this, but there's a faint sense of mounting power, higher up the mountain, and increasingly foreboding cliff faces. At the peak of the mountain, there's a faint... mirage, almost? Seems like it's something that isn't too conductive to peeking from afar, at least. 

...At a second glance, those giant piles of boulders dotting some of the cliffs and scattered at a few points down the road don't look particularly natural, do they. 

Gorgeous.

Work to do, though. She's tempted to go check out those rocks, but first she needs to find her target. What is it bodyguards call them? The principal, yeah. 

Another crack, as she starts to fall, to a point above the trail a ways along.

Anything look like people?

Nothing yet. 

This is going to take a bit. She needs to optimize her apparations, avoid compression cramps and ear pain. That means slowing the apparation down so she doesn't have to compress and decompress as sharply, and so she doesn't displace the air as quickly. 

Good thing she's high enough to handle those without going splat.

Pop—

      —Pop

Bit by bit, she apparates her way along above the trail, watching for signs of wandering martial artists.

There's nothing for a few trips, then - 

It looks like the fire at one of the camps is still smoldering? Someone must have just passed through. 

Getting close. She shifts lower, over subsequent pops, and takes care to keep them as slow and quiet as she safely can. She has several seconds of freefall every jump, both to keep the compression softer and to slow the build up of channeling strain in her nerves. She'll find them soon, she's sure of it.

Ideally she wants to find a fork in the path she can meet them at, or discover they're moving slow enough that she could jog to catch them from behind. That would make the meeting look more natural. On the other hand, they may notice her chain of apparations, and saying she saw them and hopes to travel with them for mutual benefit is conveniently true.

She'll decide when she sees where they are.

After another pop around or two, she can see a pair of people walking together up the path - a wizened old man in dignified grey brown robes and a perky teenager with peach pink hair and a tightly fitting yukata with red highlights. 

Any sign of a convenient place to approach from? Or does she have to appear in front of them and yolo this?

She could apparate in front of them on the path, or jog up behind them, if she wanted? The sightlines are pretty clear, here, but if she wanted to, she could probably pop out from behind one of the boulders or hide behind one of the bushes. 

She apparates behind them on the trail, far enough back that even somewhat superhuman hearing won't catch the pop of an apparation with at least a little effort behind it, and stretches it out slow enough to be as quiet as she can manage, then she sets off toward them at a light jog, dropping to a powerwalk when she gets closer, and from there to a walk just a bit faster than theirs.

When she gets close enough that this feels vaguely reasonable, she calls out to them. "Hello, fellow travelers!"

When they call out, the old master glances over at his travelling companion, shrugging his head in a vaguely unamused fashion, bringing them to a halt as he turns to look at her, unsuprised and vague unamused. A sheathed sword can be seen, bobbing at his hip as he turns, with his hand idly resting in the folds of his cloak just by it. 

"Hail yourself, foreigner. What brings you to the Cragged Lands?" 

She glances up at her master for guidance, for a moment, before her eyes settle on looking at her, quiet and appraising. 

"I wish to see these lands, so distant from my own, and learn from the people here, in matters from customs to training methods, and would share what can be taught of my own arts. I mean no harm to any who do not seek to harm me first."

She is calm, self-assured. Earlier today she just saved Dr. Martin Luther King, she is absolutely cool enough for this. She's ready for trouble if it happens, but she has yet to draw a weapon of any sort.

"Hm."

He glances up into the air, then huff sighs faintly. 

"There are many far away lands from most anywhere you could name, but I suppose this is a fine enough place to train for those willing to brave these dangers." 

And not a very particular other danger that might come to mind. Not that he's in much position to judge. And she does smell of... not quite shen cultivation, but something that reminds him of it, at any rate. The sort of treasure he wouldn't be too inclined to give a long leash, he'd expect. 

"Do you have passage or a party arranged? It's rare to see solo travelers in a place like this." 

She smiles wryly. "That I don't. Hoped to meet possible companions on the road."

He lets out a low rolling grunt. It's a rather dubious noise. 

She glances up at him, a questioning look on her face. 

He reaches up a hand to rub sleep from his eyes. 

"And I imagine you're hoping to travel with us, then?" 

"Be awfully nice of you. I'll cope well enough if not — take quite the dangerous wilderness to give me more'n a moment's bother — but you're the first travelers I've met since setting out."

He harumphs lightly.

"I suppose it shouldn't hurt too much to travel with you 'til you find someone else." 

She smiles tentatively, and... it's hard to tell, but it seems like her shoulders relax slightly? 

"Shall we introduce ourselves, if we are to be travelling together? I know some who wander far and wide try to escape the burden of a name and a history, but having a sense of them can make things flow far simpler, at times." 

She nods, smiling. "Hailey Harper, from a land called Britain. We put names given first, then family, there; I know some cultures do it the other way around."

"'Brit-ain, huh...?" 

She sighs airly. 

"I am Lu Si Na, a warrior studying under -" 

"A man too old to bother with a name or a title, thank you very much." 

He snorts. 

"You mentioned having a strange magic, earlier, and I can smell it on you. Anything you'd like to say about it before we return to our path?" 

She nods. "My magic is very flexible. It works by channeling energy from the environment and shaping it to the effect you want, aided by a physical focus." With a flick of her wrist, her wand drops into her left hand.

"For example, I can reshape objects," she says as she swishes her wand, turning a nearby rock into an arrow, then a wooden trunk, then a glass statue of a dancer, then back to a rock.

"I can do most things, from motion to elemental spells to shields, but it doesn't enhance my physical body much at all, just a bit of durability and faster responses over a normal person. By and large physical capabilities are something I have to train the old-fashioned way."

He wrinkles his nose at it a little, and scratches his beard in thought. It's not very grounded in the essence of things, at least in the quick transformations she's shown and her power wells without end through her corpus, but she doesn't quite have the presence to match. He can see why it would be useful, but it seems like it's an awkward path for a warrior who needs to face hardened foes. She'll have little to learn from it, save perhaps some fine work on her control or as a dummy to test against. 

She smiles openly. 

"The flexibility of that transformation is incredible, especially if that's just one of the things you can do! It's a little unfortunate that your path doesn't harden your body too well, but Master's exercises aren't something I'd recommend to most, and many martial paths that would give you those benefits are nearly as harsh." 

"Is there anything you can do with motion to speed up our travels? I don't have the finest sense of your powers, but they seem difficult to deplete, so..." 

She tilts her head curiously. 

"I can instantaneously transport myself and others to anywhere I've seen or been before, though taking passengers can be a bit straining, as can repeated leaps. Enchanted objects for flight are the usual way of speeding travel across long distances through unfamiliar lands, but I don't own one myself and they're a mite complicated to craft."

"Oh, that's a shame! You should really look into one - having a flying sword has been a huge treat, for me." 

She hums lightly. 

"Part of our practice makes our bodies considerably more resistant to certain manipulations, including spatial ones, so I wouldn't want to risk it, given that you've mentioned that it can be a strain to carry passengers even normally." 

She spins on her feet, and sighs warmly. 

"So... Off we go?" 

"Oh, yeah, that'd make side-alonging one of you a bloody headache, for sure."

Then she nods and stretches. "But yeah, we should get moving. I don't want to hold up your travels."

"Very well." 

And off they go.