Raza - Ghost Light In The Green Room (2018)

Episode 1 – Renaissance : In the rumble of a thunder, the god of sky and thunder, Zeus constructs a beautifully bewitching woman and his wife gives her the name Panthera. Each god bestows upon her different strengths and skills and qualities. Aphrodite gives her the ability to love, Apollo teaches her how to play the lute and paint, and Demeter gives her fertility and vigour. Zeus’s son Hephaestus – the most grotesque god, was not invited in the making of Panthera, and therefore could not grant her with the most important thing he had, which was immortality.

Zeus remembers since he unintentionally supplemented hope when he had created Pandora 100 years ago. This time, Zeus creates the most perfectly destructive chest filled with the most monstrous substances humans can ever experience. This time he puts in the chest no such thing that could possibly save humanity from the fatality. He orders Panthera to deliver the chest to a post-apocalyptic planet, but instructs her to never open the chest herself.

Episode 2 - Cosmic Walker : Panthera travels from Mount Olympus to KELT-2Ab – an exosolarplanet located in the galaxy known as Andromeda, which happens to be the nearest galaxy from our Milky Way. Earth had suffered from a lack of resources due to Persephone’s curse on the planet. Dwellers of the earth had infuriated Persephone by neglecting the planet and its environment and putting it through extreme measures via scientific progressions – which led to the survivors of Earth relocating to KELT-2Ab, a planet located in Andromeda. However, when Panthera arrives in KELT-2Ab in the advised location, she notices something very peculiar about the inhabitants there – they don’t look anything like the humans Zeus had created once upon a time.

Episode 3 - Cerebral Diffraction : As Panthera gets accustomed to the planet and the residents of KELT-2Ab, she recognizes there are two genus of organisms – Homo androcephalus and Homo decerebrate. Homo androcephalus consists of a group of 200 andro-humans or mechanized humans with superhuman abilities like being able to fly at the speed of light, calculate any given numerical problem, communicate in any language whether phonemic or not, and be able to survive in extreme temperatures and atmospheric pressures. Homo decerebrate consists of a group of 50 man-like colossal 40-50 feet demi-human creatures with a stiffened body posture, inability to communicate, and an appetite for Homo androcephalus. Upon further investigation, she discovers that Homo decerebrates do not have the Telencephalon component of the human brain, but they have a rather primitive brain composed of extremely primitive variants of midbrain and hindbrain. In the year of 5020, Panthera found it absurd that a species can evolve backwards to a more primitive stage rather than evolving forward as a species that would enhance chances of survival and reproductive occurrences.

Episode 4 - Opus Colossus : Panthera unearths further that the unintelligent gigantic demi-humans are called goliaths, and to prevent them from preying on andro-humans, the andro-humans built a mile high electric barrier to keep them from coming inside the coliseum where they andro-humans reside. The coliseum is a massive outdoor arena that is bordered with electric barricade. Panthera also learns that the 20 strongest andro-humans are training in order to always be ready to fight if at any time the goliaths shall attack, and to discretely capture a number of goliaths for scientific research.

Episode 5 - The Cyborg’s Apprentice : Panthera comes across the most elegant andro-human who had gold helm protecting his computer and mechanical components interior to the cephalon, and a gold breastplate protecting his haemoglobin machine that is usually located on the left side of the chest of andro-humans. He was playing an organ so alluringly that she felt compelled to approach him. She finds out his name is Morpheus, and he’s the only musician left out of the 200 andro-humans. She befriends him and shows him her ancient lute and seeks to become his apprentice to learn more about music and arts as they persist on KELT-2Ab.

Episode 6 - Morpheus and Panthera : Panthera was created to be a pure human, and thus soon falls in love with Morpheus. But Morpheus is only part human, and does not have a fully functioning Dopaminergic pathway to feel the pleasure of love and other intimate emotions. They try to make love but he reveals that the entirety of the andro-human race, including him, has been chemically castrated. This was done to inhibit reproduction because repeated exposure to extreme conditions had left the race with a mutation to their adrenal gland, resulting in the inability to produce testosterone. Meaning – even if they do reproduce, the offspring will not evolve without artificial means for reproduction – which is improbable due to the limited resources. Andro-humans chose this as a method of auto-euthanization of the race. Andro-humans also take additional supplementary capsule that contains diesel which maintains their superhuman strengths and abilities.

Episode 7 – Hexed : Panthera’s life becomes very intertwined with the andro-humans as she makes more and more acquaintances, albeit, not receiving reciprocation of her feelings from the love her life. One fateful night, intoxicated and despondent and curious for some hope and miracle, Panthera opens the chest that Zeus gave her. The atrocious oddities that include diseases, illnesses, poverty, death, that come out of the box hit her first and hit her the hardest. Lacking the superhuman abilities to fight off extreme conditions, she falls terminally ill and enters a vegetative state.

Episode 8 - Prelude To Hades : Morpheus starts feeling epidermal sadness when his apprentice suddenly falls ill without any indication of ever getting better. He stops taking his diesel capsules in order to try to achieve and understand Panthera’s physiology to nourish her enough to help her get her health back. Within a week of discontinuing the capsules, Morpheus starts feeling emotions which he cannot comprehend and starts spending every waking hour by Panthera’s bedside. Realizing that the only way to get back Panthera is by convincing the god of the underworld, Morpheus arranges to play a concerto for Hades and sends him an invitation through a clairvoyant agent. Hearing about this, Zeus plans to go in the form of Hades so he can recover Panthera and the chest before anyone finds out, and inevitably hides the letter from Hades.

Morpheus starts the concerto when of all the inhabitants of the coliseum and Zeus in the form of Hades gathered around his organ. In the middle of the symphony, one of the goliaths, extremely physically instigated, break a hole through the wall and starts invading the coliseum. The goliaths devour all the andro-humans but could not devour Zeus since he is not human and his body contains no carbon compounds that the goliaths need to survive. The goliaths leave Zeus lethally injured. Morpheus’s tune had touched Hades all the way to Mount Olympus so he decides to make his way down to the coliseum in KELT-2Ab without receiving the invitation, but he arrives a little too late as all the inhabitants of the coliseum except for Morpheus and Panthera are dead now and the goliaths are feasting on the deceased.

Episode 9 - Hammer of the Gods : Hades confronts a wounded Zeus for trying to deceive others in the form of Hades, and banishes him to hell for all eternity. Realizing how Morpheus and Panthera felt about each other and how his comrade Zeus is responsible for this tragic incidence, Hades allocates Morpheus and Panthera to be together in the underworld.

Later that day, Persephone tells Hades that the reason Morpheus started spending more time ensuing his cessation of the capsule ingestion is because the capsules inhibit eliciting emotions to counterbalance the superhuman strengths it provides them with. Persephone further expounds that the reason there are two types of the Homo genus is because, when Homo sapiens first moved to KELT-2Ab, they were vigorously seeking to invent scientific ways to make humans more insusceptible to the extreme temperature, pressure, and way of life on the new planet in a new galaxy. The scientists conducted experiments on many of the humans before finally coming across a solution – which was to eliminate emotion eliciting stimuli to strengthen the mechanical framework they were already working on. However, to come to the solution, they had to put many innocent lives in experimental conditions, which resulted in various forms of mutilations in those test subjects.

The test subjects started growing to abnormal sizes and therefore their brains could no longer provide them with the normal functions, since their metabolism no longer matched that of their old brains’. The scientists and other people who were fortunate enough to not be one of the test subjects found ways to fend them off, all the while maintaining their super human abilities and lack of empathy. But when Morpheus played his heart wrenching concerto dedicated to Panthera, it provoked human-like feelings in the goliaths, which caused them to break in to get to the coliseum.

That night, just like every night, Persephone threw away her pomegranate that Hades gives her to eat every night. She stayed with Hades because she loved him, not because of magical pomegranates like everyone in the underground assumed.

Dr. Raza – Keys, Engineering, Composition
Fariha Mahbub – Concept, Video, Production

Track List:
01. Renaissance 07:50
02. Cosmic Walker 06:13
03. Cerebral Diffraction 07:53
04. Opus Colossus 13:13
05. The Cyborg's Apprentice 05:10
06. Morpheus And Panthera 10:48
07. Hexed 04:48
08. Prelude To Hades 02:51
09. Hammer Of The Gods 07:39

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