I got an idea: please tell me about Chelsie!
Originally, I had intended for the felin to count in quinary, base five, as a matter of fact, while the scholars specifically would count in hexadecimal, since they were more likely to reach higher numbers.
Chelsie the Huntress, having grown up outside of felin culture on a non-colony world, learned to count in decimal instead, like most of humanity does.
So Chelsie makes her way back to Karina, as the felin home world Firrhna Prime is known by its people, and quickly (relatively speaking) assimilates into her people's culture, but she still regularly fucks up on numbers and has to mentally convert between bases.
One time, a faker went around pretending to be her. A dangerous thing to try considering how lethal she was. So obviously after some confusing shenanigans the two are caught in one place together, and someone has to be arrested for impersonating a Hero.
Someone in the crowd recalls this rumor about Chelsie being weird about numbers higher than 10, and shouts the question to her and the faker, "think fast, what's nine plus five?"
The faker almost immediately calls back "lonemrhi", 0xE in felinese.
Chelsie, at just about the same time, calls back "tie-nemrhi". Fourteen.
Within seconds, half the crowd is on the faker's ass, all of them out for their fourteen pounds of flesh.
Now, like I said at the start, originally non-scholar felin would count in base five, but I reconsidered and made the quinary thing a historical curiosity. Something to trip up in-universe historians. Fortunately, this only changes one little detail about the above story -- the faker's answer.
