Stack, stack, stack

As far as he could tell, no one had actually explained what a bakril was, and Henry had spent so long plucking up the courage to raise a hand that the moment passed. Now he stood sweating under half a tonne of NASA-made fibres, looking down a line of, on the whole, equally confused faces. He gripped the alien object with a gloved hand.

Somebody unexpectedly spoke directly to him. It was a skinny boy with acne and a minor rash of face. The boy was saying something about the government. Henry had never been good at this sort of thing. He looked about for someone more senior but they were all otherwise engaged with cbs and horses and dogs and lines and the like. At the briefing the whiteboards had reminded him of playing John Madden on the Mega Drive when he was a kid, a game which had never made much sense to him either.

The boy was still talking at him; such conviction, such knowledge. He adjusted his grip. There was a shout from further down the line, a call he repeated without thinking. It seemed they were to advance. There were people in the way though. They moved forward as one. Henry shut his eyes but found the situation more disturbing that way. The boy was still talking at him, louder now. Someone to his left swung a shield and the boy was distracted. The line stopped and after a brief scuffle some kind of equilibrium was found.

The guy to his left had lost his shield and drawn the bakril in its stead. He rotated it in his hand, like a cheerleader's baton, until he found a stance that worked for him. It looked odd to Henry, like a spotty teenager missing the experience of his first kiss because he can't work out the correct arrangement of hands. Henry was glad he could at least follow his colleague's example and wouldn't have to go through that himself. He figured that as long as everyone did likewise they'd do okay.

The bakril was even heavier unclasped from his belt. He was glad the skinny boy was gone. There were plenty of others though, all wanting to talk to him.