The Stakeholder Meeting That Turned Into an Actual Stakeholder Meeting
It was supposed to be a routine meeting. Quarterly alignment, Q&A with product, minor bloodletting. Nothing unusual. We were three devs deep into bug triage, eating dried beet chips and waiting for someone to fix the projector. The invitation had promised coffee and “a discussion around roadmap velocity.” I should have known better. They always get you with the snacks.
Our team—codenamed Nightshade—works on the backend systems for DracEats, a platform that delivers fresh blood to vampires with sophisticated palates and low patience. We maintain the recommendation engine, the blood freshness tracker, and the cursed caching layer we inherited from a long-departed necromancer. All in all, very standard work for Transilvania’s nocturnal tech scene.
The stakeholders in question were mostly mortal: mid-level product managers, brand folks, the kind of humans who say things like “vampire verticals” and mean it. They’d booked the meeting room with the least amount of natural light—out of courtesy, I assumed. And yet, something felt… off.
The scent hit me first. Not garlic—thank the void—but wood. Fresh, sharp, purposeful. You don’t forget that smell when you’ve lived long enough. A new pine stake smells like ambition. An old one smells like intent.
I ignored it at first. It’s common enough for humans to carry wooden pens or wear cedar cologne, especially the rustic types from Human Resources. But as the product director, Melissa, entered the room, I noticed her laptop bag had a peculiar bulge—not quite square, not quite innocent. She smiled. I smiled back. The meeting began.
The first twenty minutes were normal. Slides, graphs, some talk about churn in the O-negative segment. I nodded, took notes, and doodled a small skull in the margin of my bloodflow metrics. The usual. Then came the dreaded roadmap realignment.
“I think we need to sunset the CryptAPI,” Melissa said, using that corporate tone that makes every horrible idea sound like a group hug. “It’s expensive, legacy, and only Lorenzo seems to understand it.”
All eyes turned to me.
Now, the CryptAPI is, in fairness, a tangled mess of functions, enchantments, and low-level blood logic. But it works. It’s the beating heart of our backend. Sunsetting it would mean rewriting half the stack. And more importantly, it’s bound to me. Literally. It doesn’t compile unless I’m within 100 meters of the production server.
“I wouldn’t recommend that,” I said carefully. “There are… dependencies.”
“Legacy dependencies?” Melissa asked.
“Spiritual ones,” I said.
There was a pause. Someone coughed. A mortal developer shifted in his seat, visibly confused. And then the next slide loaded. It was titled: “Risks and Mitigations.”
The bullets were vague, corporate, sanitized. But the subtext was clear: I was the risk. And mitigation? Well, that came in the form of the bulge now clearly visible in Melissa’s bag—half-exposed, sharp, wooden. Handmade, I noticed. Sanded with care. The kind of thing you don’t buy in bulk.
I stood slowly. “Is this… a performance review?” I asked.
“No, Lorenzo,” she said, still smiling. “This is an escalation.”
Things moved quickly after that. I dodged left as she lunged, knocking over a chair and sending her beautifully animated slide deck crashing to the floor. A stake is no good unless it finds the heart, and I hadn’t survived four centuries by having bad cardio.
The others fled. The HR rep screamed. Someone spilled beet chips into a keyboard and set off the fire suppression system. But I was focused on Melissa, now circling the table like she’d trained for this. Perhaps she had. Product managers are known for planning.
“Sunset this,” I muttered, flipping the whiteboard toward her as cover. She swatted it aside. The stake glinted in the emergency lights.
In the end, it wasn’t combat that saved me. It was compliance.
“Melissa,” I said, voice calm, cloak slightly askew, “you haven’t filed the proper offboarding paperwork.”
That stopped her. Only slightly—but enough.
“You think Legal will back a stakeholder meeting with a stake in it?” I continued. “I’m technically an eternal contractor. You can’t terminate me without violating three labor clauses and at least one supernatural treaty.”
She hesitated. Even mortal ambition has its limits.
A second later, security arrived—two werewolves in ill-fitting polos who mostly just wanted to make sure no one was bleeding on the furniture. Melissa was escorted out, the stake confiscated, the projector reset. I signed an incident report using my full ancient name, which took twenty minutes and a call to IT to render correctly in Unicode.
The meeting adjourned shortly after, with vague promises to revisit the roadmap in Q2.
In the days that followed, things returned to normal. Mostly. Melissa was “on leave,” and CryptAPI received a surprise budget bump. No one mentioned the meeting. No one touched the whiteboard. The beet chips were replaced with synthetic blood chews, a strangely thoughtful gesture from Facilities.
But something had changed.
I now sit with my back to the wall during meetings. I always carry a charm against hostile reorgs. And I’ve started documenting the CryptAPI in case I ever do vanish in a puff of burned documentation and legacy tests. Just in case.
Because in tech, the scariest stakeholders aren’t always the ones who ask about deadlines.
Sometimes, they bring stakes.