A tale of monsters. (Or are there none?)
His sister Venus is 17, a vampire and a hacker, and she has never seen her own face. He's left her a cure for sunlight, and it only works if 8 monsters give up a piece of themselves by choice.
Go to the funeral Press play For producers and partners
A music-driven animated series. 9 episodes of 45 to 60 minutes. In development.
Official record: Attendance unremarkable.
At the cemetery gate the sign says PRIVATE FUNERAL. A djinn flicks her fingers and adds a line: YES, THAT INCLUDES NECROMANCERS. A necromancer hides his shovel behind his flowers.
A banshee's tears burn through every tissue a werewolf offers her, so he reaches into another pocket and unfolds a ballistic nylon napkin.
Ghost children drift through the umbrellas, and every raindrop that crosses them turns into a tiny prism.
A soaked phoenix shakes out her wings. A hedge catches fire. The gargoyle beside her spits on the flames without looking up from the order of service.
Under the old trees stands a girl in a red dress, gumboots and mismatched socks, with a polka-dot umbrella hiding more eyes than one face should hold. "Sayonara, my brilliant fool," she says, and steps backwards out of the world.
Venus stands up with a page of eulogy, and the rain has already eaten the ink. She looks at the coffin and manages 4 words.
He was my world.
Orion Xavier Akino
Took every breath.
Lived every second.
Embraced every experience.
It was awesome.
Official record: Subject deceased. Status closed.
A bass note rises out of the cooling fan in his lab. Her unplugged headphones answer it. Then her dead brother assembles himself in green pixels across every screen in the room.
HE WAS MY WORLD
DEAD AND STILL A DOUCHEBAG
From the pilot, Bye. For Now.
Official record, corrected: Status active. Source unresolved.
Vampires have spent centuries chasing immortality. Orion wanted something smaller and much harder: one morning at Echo Beach with his sister, outside, with no glass between them and the sun.
He got as far as a recipe. He wrote it in rhyme, because he was insufferable.
A mix so potent, follow with care,
Unicorn spit with chai, so rare.
Medusa's tears, from laughter so bright,
To bring healing and joy, and banish all fright.
Hurry, go get a freshly spun web,
From a Jorōgumo, a silky smooth thread.
An Amazonian vine, natural and true,
A Cyclops' eyelash, or even a few.
Then Venus reads the small print, and the comedy stops.
"Eight gifts. Freely given. Choice is the catalyst. Taking creates something else."Orion Akino
Every ingredient lives inside somebody, and it's the exact part of themselves the world taught them to hide. So Venus goes looking for ingredients and finds a family.
Official record: Observation builds trust.
Gorgons run fashion houses. A three-headed dragon pulls the coffee. Cyclopes study engineering. A ghost argues over whose turn it is to clear the tables. It's a Gothic-neon city where monsters and humans have lived side by side for so long that nobody remembers it being remarkable, all under the soft blue glow of a system that likes its monsters calm, managed and polite.
A café one storey taller inside than outside. A vine curls around the door handle and lets go as you arrive. The floor gives underfoot like grass, the plants lean towards the conversations they like, and the light stays golden at any hour. The tables make room for tails, wings, stone hips and extra knees.
Where two waves meet. A small wave travels inside a larger one until you can see the seam. Venus has watched this beach through a laptop her whole life, and she's saved one marker on the sand. She named it ONE DAY.
Leaks. Blockages. Poltergeists. There's a white van outside the café that has never once fixed a pipe.
The Sanctuary Against Violent Extremes, an initiative of the League of Virtue and Equality. The L.O.V.E. Coalition has very good branding. Every act of love is a camera.
The more honestly you live your own nature, the stronger your magic runs. Masking, shrinking and apologising drain it. In a city built to keep everyone small, that makes being yourself a security incident.
Official record: Persons of interest: 9.
They've left out the good parts. Momo Jr.
Vampire. Hacker. Newly appointed pain in your collective arse.
Her mirror shows the room and leaves her out, so she does her eyeliner by feel: one perfect wing, one ambitious disaster. She fake breathes during yoga. She once got into San Mágos Monster Prison so her brother could interview a ghoul, and every cell in the building opened behind him.
I object to any beverage with coagulation ambitions.
Half vampire, named Sunshine. The family comedy lasted years.
Her smile arrives 2 seconds before the rest of her. She was Orion's research partner, she keeps cold-pressed extra virgin web in the pockets of a four-sleeved denim jacket, and mirrors have been acting strangely since she came to town.
Too many questions, mi chica guapa.
Eva isn't crying. Her snakes are crying. There is, she maintains, a difference.
She runs the fashion house GAZE and nobody has seen her face, because her gaze turns living things to stone. Her 8 snakes sit on the Style Council and drill avant-garde hairstyles to a whistle. Waves runs the escape routes, Curls tells the truth, and Shimmy answers to Bartholomew on formal occasions.
Beige in San Mágos is an apology for existing.
Love warms the air between two people by 0.3 degrees. He's measured it.
A Cyclops giant who learned meditation over Zoom from a mountain spirit. He once sat through a magnitude 4.2 earthquake, and the spilled tea bothered him more. His "Eye of the Tiger" sits somewhere between a foghorn suffering an existential crisis and a lovesick moose attempting opera.
Thank you! Try the croissants, they're life-changing!
She's 18 years old. Some of her isn't.
Her right hand belonged to a chef, her heart to a 22-year-old cellist, and her left knee was at Woodstock, which is why it still bends out of time when guitars come on. She wakes up singing songs she never learned. One of her soufflés briefly achieved sentience, and it was better company than most parties.
Eat. Then save the world. In that order.
The night he was born, the stars moved 3 degrees and pretended nothing had happened.
The city filed it as The Sparkle Incident. His horn picks up music that won't exist for another 300 years, and it once played a dead man's actual favourite song halfway through his eulogy. He orders the same thing at 8:22 every morning and leaves one bite of cheesecake on the plate. He can't explain why.
I'm Lucky. Lucky Glitterbutt. And yes, that's my real name.
One dragon. Three minds. One very well-run café.
Joy reads a room like weather and adjusts her polka-dot bow 17 times a shift. Prince tests 3 spoons against a cup for pitch. X improves the queue by moving one sugar bowl 4 centimetres and the other 8. When Bolt mentioned the chairs were too small, 3 new ones appeared overnight and nobody discussed it.
You stopped exactly 1.4 metres inside the door. Last time, 0.6.
She holds appointments in 3 departments, because no faculty can agree where a phoenix belongs.
Her dress sheds embers like fireflies, and she has set her own whiteboard on fire mid-lecture. She once brought a violin case to a parent-teacher conference with actual smoke coming out of it. She teaches film, and her students come out dangerous.
Safe truths don't need documenting.
Human. Heir. Tells his father he's at the library.
He's at MTHRNTR. His bedroom is big enough to play tennis in and he uses it for waiting. He offers his first name only, and his running joke, that he was adopted from a monster orphanage, gets less funny at home every year.
Lying to my parents has become my primary life skill.
Now the ones you fear. Yeti
A salt-and-pepper goatee maintained to the millimetre, and a hatred kept to the same standard. He rides up through his own building, watches monsters and humans doing paperwork together in the lobby, and goes back upstairs in no hurry at all.
And have the roses trimmed again. They've grown back.
She walks her gardens barefoot at night, and the roses tilt towards her wrist.
I was thinking about the garden. It needs tending.
Henry's identical twin. As a boy he cried for an hour after stepping on a beetle. These days he takes notes that look like reports.
San Mágos keeps an official record. Three cryptids keep the true one, from a booth at the back of the café, on a microphone they describe as somewhat borrowed.
Madame Momo is warm, orange and from Missouri, and she decides what can be told and when.
Yeti is part Himalayan, part surfer. He hears the truth in a song before anyone has finished singing it. His grandfather faked his death and moved to the mountains, and got it done during a documentary shoot.
Momo Jr. is too big for the booth and asks the questions, lots of them. He arrived with a page of notes and now needs a second clipboard.
We tell them everything and nothing.
Official record: Unlicensed humming will be logged.
The show's first bassline comes from a salt shaker. Yeti rolls it beside the microphone, a cup meets a saucer, an espresso valve breathes, 3 spoons strike 3 notes, and an ordinary café turns into a score. That's the rule of the series: music is built from the room, and a song can change what a character understands or what they can do. One forgotten song can become a hundred voices.
Three albums and a single are already out in the world, and every song has its moment in the story. Press play on any of them.
The unicorn farts sparkles
The medusa sips her tea
At MTHRNTR Café
You can be who you'll be
Venus and Sunshine
Is it her, or is it me?
A shattered prism, what do you see?
Orion
I know what you think.
You think I'm gone.
But look again.
Eva
Kiss the mask,
Miss the girl.
Bolt and Duke
So if you feel too much. Good.
It means you're alive, and you're not alone.
Lola
All of it at once
All of it too much
All of it like honey
All of it like rust
Joy, and everyone
Medusa's hairstyles and
Vampire sunscreen
Cyclops' yoga mats and
Unicorn ice cream
Apollonia
Seven told me, "Stay contained"
I turned scars to champagne
Henry
Mirror, mirror, monster there,
Twist the truth, pretend you care.
The booth presses play
Step right up, the show's begun,
A tale of monsters (or are there none?)
Overtures, mirrors, funerals and the first door inside the door.
Songs of voice, visibility, reinvention and refusing the edit.
Five songs about judgement, becoming and the selves that return.
A first listen to the emotional language being developed for the screen.
Every song, volume by volume Follow on Spotify
Lyrics by Charbel A. Zeaiter, released as Charbel X. The current recordings are development demos that prove the songs and their place in the story. The production plan is new recordings with performing artists for the screen.
Official record: Nine incidents. All contained.
Exactly. Momo Jr.
A funeral, an impossible mirror and a dead brother who stays.
Eight snakes, one whistle and the worst karaoke in San Mágos.
A daughter who won't be looked at, and a mother who has hidden her face for 20 years.
Stones arrive on a nightstand at 3am, carved with a history older than the city.
Glasses designed around monster eyes, and a design nobody is allowed to buy.
An oven speaks in the voices of the dead, and it has notes on the bread.
A unicorn's footage is full of light nobody else can see.
A room full of strangers sings a song it has never heard, one voice at a time.
No equipment, no agenda, and a small wave travelling inside a larger one.
Venus walks into MTHRNTR for the first time since the funeral. Joy has already plated an almond croissant for her. Venus tears it in two, slides half towards the empty stool beside her, and then orders a croissant for every occupied table.
By the end of the hour she's picked a fight with the city's entire surveillance network, and she hasn't even started being creative yet.
Season 1, 9 episodes. They find one another.
Season 2, 9 episodes. They outgrow the selves that saved them.
Season 3, 10 episodes. They learn how to live after waking up.
The one who made the monsters
"I never fitted either world, so I built three."
"Momo & Yeti came from being rejected by two worlds and working out who I am. Every monster in it carries a part of themselves the world taught them to hide."
Charbel A. Zeaiter is a Sydney-based writer, designer and founder with 30 years across design, technology, entrepreneurship and education. He founded Faster Zebra, a school, studio and intergenerational community for people building ventures that build them back, and Velvet Onion & Friends, an innovation consultancy and venture studio that has built original intellectual property alongside client work since 2001. His line across all of it: good things come to those who make.
He's developing three animated series: Momo & Yeti, Dino Loco and Kith9.
For Momo & Yeti he's written the pilot, the three-season plan, the novels it adapts and the lyrics for 3 albums.
For producers, broadcasters and partners.
Arcane for character stakes and political conflict, Spider-Verse for expressive animation, KPop Demon Hunters for music inside a supernatural adventure, and Wednesday and Umbrella Academy for irreverence and found family.
9 episodes of 45 to 60 minutes. Three seasons developed, of 9, 9 and 10 episodes, with a known ending. For older young adults and adults, 16 to 34.
Pilot screenplay Bye. For Now., Season 1 episode map, three-season plan, 6 source novels, 3 albums and a single of original songs recorded as development demos, 31 designed characters and a visual pitch pack.
A Medusa whose snakes have opinions, a dragon with 3 minds and a city that changes colour when it remembers. Animation holds all of it in one frame, and the colour grade argues the politics on its own: every monster carries a warm palette against the corporate blue of the system.
The songs can reach a market before a single episode airs. The heart of the show is a Japanese vampire family, the Akinos, with a mother trained as a special-forces strategist and a father who once ran a Banchō gang. The monsters come from everywhere: Medusas, Cyclopes, Jorōgumo, Balaur, Himalayan Yeti and the Missouri Momo.
The pilot screenplay, series development material and selected music demos.
Keep recording. Madame Momo
Producers, broadcasters and partners can connect with Charbel on LinkedIn or leave a message here. Everyone else can follow along on Instagram, where the characters turn up first.
Rights and development enquiries go to the creator directly.