Yeah, you can get away with a lot of vagueness when you’re freely mish-mashing different cultures in a fictitious place like Japanada…but some things are simply binary: black or white, no space for any shade of grey (let alone fifty).
While you probably can eat maple-syrup-drenched pancakes with chopsticks, if only with some difficulties, the finger-counting thing is one of those binary ones: in Japan, you start with fingers outstretched and count by folding fingers, in Canada you start with a fist and count by extending fingers. If you mix those two systems…you just get confused.
And Latho has to rely on counting by his fingers, even for small numbers…he’s a being of pure chaos, after all, so he’s horrible at simple math. He could probably easily convolve fractals, but counting discrete units is just far too straightforward for his kind of mind. ._.
For the convenience of the readership: Everyone is present and ac-counted for. Six to seven persons in all, depending on whether you count the twins as one or two. And they all appear very menacing from Latho’s perspective, which probably doesn’t help him concentrate at all.
More on Monday.
Cultural differences can crackers to slip a rozzer the dropsy in snide!
I couldn’t have put it better. XD