Anyone who knows the area will presumably know what the hazards are! And be less interesting to bandits or strangers.

She and her randomly selected teenage boy, Yun, head out with some provisions. "What's your land called?" Yun wants to know.

"Nolordel."

"Huh. Is it very far? You don't look like you've been traveling for months."

"I ended up here in some kind of accident, I was only a few hours from home. I suspect it's very far or they'd have found me by now - also I haven't heard of a Tiger Emperor -" 

"Huh. That's a lot of magic you're mixed up in. Did strangers do it?"

"No. Where I'm from it's - not common but it's known how to get that good if you want to and if you're willing to accept some risk. What're strangers -"

"Do you not have strangers in - No-lo-ri-del? They're a little taller than people, with feathers -"

"Nolordel's mostly a human kingdom. And, like, a nymph here and there and a dragon in the highlands and some of the port cities see all kinds of things but that's not a species I know of personally."

"A dragon! I've never seen a dragon. But we see strangers, sometimes. If you want we can go through their passage - it's a little eerie, but I've never heard of them hurting someone on the passage, they made it for humans to go through. It'll save us a climb uphill."

"I haven't seen a dragon either. The point of knowing where a dragon is is that you can be sure not to see it. If the passage is safe that's fine with me."

"We'll be there in, oh, two or three hours, when we're through all this bamboo." He waves at the bamboo around the road.

"Okay. I'll have to cast the language spell a couple more times, it only lasts two hours."

"- by yourself?"

" - I think probably you've got a different style of magic around here. Mine you can cast yourself, couple of times a day, more as you get better at it and have more mana to spend on it."

"Wow. Your land must be so different."

"You guys would probably find your lives profoundly improved by an ethernet but I'd be careful about adding it if you don't have it, it might just not work around here."

"What's that?"

"It's pretty new! You teach crystal balls to recognize one another and then you can send messages between them instantaneously, people maintain spheres for talking about the news or crime or pictures of themselves or pictures of cute animals or tutorials on doing things..."

"...I'm not sure I can quite imagine it. One person made this?"

"No, no, that'd have been hundreds, and it took them decades."

"Hundreds of magic people - I'm not sure there are that many in the whole empire."

"There kind of have to be more where I'm from because it's - more hazardous, we'd have run into at least half a dozen things trying to kill us on a path like this unless it was specifically warded against that and maintained more often than this looks like it is."

"But how do you get them?"

"People learn. Some kinds you can teach in a school, like anything else, not everyone'll get it but the same way not everyone can make any sense of math. Some kinds people are born with, though you can train it up. And that's humans. In some species they're all magic."