Rouge's Mambele (Patreon)

Thanks very much to everyone who stuck with me for another month! I hope you didn't miss having a joke chapter from me, but I've just never been very good at April Fool's Day. Hopefully, you got enough pranks from other people, and didn't miss it here.

So, let's talk about Rouge's weapon! When I first created Rouge's character, she was just going to have a basic knife/dagger type weapon. No big deal, and she'd probably have several different ones as she upgraded through the course of the story. Then Wep decided to be a little more than a throwaway fellow Zombie (yes, we'll see him again), and suddenly I needed something more...interesting.

I went digging through lists of medieval throwing weapons, and in a YouTube video they talked about Mambele. This is a hybrid African axe/knife, and came in all sorts of shapes, depending on who made it. It's most often identified as a longer sword type shape, but the general class of weapons is pretty wide. That gave me a lot of leeway in what it looked like, plus I liked that it was unique. I had never heard of this before.

Fun fact, the shorter variant of the Mambele is also known as a "hunga munga", and I very nearly went with that, simply because my older brother reads this book aloud to his daughters, and it made me giggle to think of him having to say "hunga munga" on a regular basis. My good sense as an author beat out my evil sister side, however, so a mambele (pronounced "mom-bay-lay" I think?) it is.

Wikipedia has a very general page about the weapon here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mambele

I'm sure that there is a more in-depth historical study of the Mambele out there, but fortunately I can blame inaccuracies on my fictional game designers, though I do the best I can without getting lost in doing homework.

If you're interested in something a little more fun, the History Channel has a cool series about unusual weapons, and they did an episode about the kpinga, which is another Mambele variant. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1edAnKhd3w

The image above is my own creation, made by combining several photos and imagining what I wanted my particular weapon to look like. And now you know!

(By the way, if you're ever curious about any particular character/item in the story, I'd gladly write up one of these little bits about it, so just let me know!)

Thanks again!

SilverSidhe/Elizabeth