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Bendan Blawmi is 20 years old, is single and likes to play baccarat. He has the best profession in the world. He’s a mine bearer. I went to interview him in a coffee house in Jamuraa. Who knows if this isn’t the coffee house Bendan will blow up in soon? To help break the ice, I offer him a cigarette.

Want one?

No, thank you. I don’t smoke. Those things can kill you, y’know?

Why mine bearer?

I didn’t really have much of a choice. My dad was a mine bearer, and so was his dad. As the firstborn, it’s my job to carry on the family work. It’s in my blood, and therefore soon will be splattered on the wall.

How did your family react to the news?

They knew I wanted to follow the fuse my granddad lit. I’ve always had the mine bearing bug in me ever since I can remember. When I was a little kid, I had the habit of throwing myself into the pool, power mine style, and soak all the keldon kids. I think it’s something that’s born with you, y’know? My family took it well. My brothers look up to me, they know a mine bearer is someone who rises up in life. My mother settled herself with my choice, but she insisted I graduated. She said an uneducated man is no more than a goblin and that, if my mine bearer career went south, I’d need something to hold on to. If I still had hands, that is. She said, “crippled is one thing, crippled and stupid is something else!”

Do you have an idea how you’d like to go off?

Well, you can never control these things, but I have an idea what I’d like to do. Above all else, I want to be successful and blow up correctly. My dream, of course, is to take a gargadon or a wurm with me, something big that people will remember me for. The one thing I dread is to be a dud, to fail to blow up a guy because they found someone’s cloak lying around. Sometimes I have nightmares that I try to blow up a Bog Elemental, that I pull the pin but the mines don’t explode. And I’m left standing there, with everyone laughing at me. I wake up panicking. It’s like those dreams you have as a kid, that you go naked to school…

And after you blow up, what do you think happens?

Man! After I blow up, I’ll wake up in heaven, next to the Prophet and seventy virgins! I’ll have seventy virgins all for myself!

Bendan, have you ever been with a virgin?

My sister.

Sexually, I mean.

Oh, no.

Do you know how much trouble a virgin is? You have to convince her to go to the bed, convince her you really do like her and that no one will think she’s a slut just for sleeping with you. Then comes the sex – well, let’s just say all that kinky stuff you see Jolrael doing in your magazines won’t fly with a virgin. And in the end, she’ll hold on to you so hard you won’t be able to get free to take a leak until morning.

I did not know that…

And worst of all, no matter how lousy you were, she’ll always look at you as “the first”. She’ll think you have some kind of special bond or something and she’ll never want to leave you. And that’s just one virgin, now imagine seventy.

I had never thought about it that way. No wonder they call it eternity…