You just had to make it into Meso-American, didn't you? Do you have a secret camera mounted at my bookshelves, because I can exlain the strange porn between my Mythos-collections and my 150lbs of books on Meso-American culture!
Count me in for a native! I'll get to work... soon.
Edit: Just threw something together, drawing more of the Aztec than the Mayans, just because I have written more papers about the former and thus can throw together something stylish and plausible with a little fact to boot. Suppose then that this is a fictional Aztec "colony" on a larger island in an archipelago somewhere off the coast of Central America. The native culture survives on fishing on the other side of the island from the Cove, agriculture along the sides of the central mountain and wars with the surrounding islands à lá Flower Wars of its mainland counterpart.
Tlaloctitlan (
City of the Earth, named after the God of rain
Tlaloc) is the city atop the mountain overlooking the Siren Cove, called
Atlmomoztli (
Altar of Water) by the natives. The almost constant rain that pours down on the mountain is carried in aqueducts cut out of the mountain through fields of crops and down to the cove. The city's king, Tepiltzin, like his predecessors, punish any polution of the waters harshly, for the Sirens of the Atlmomoztli are believed to be children of Tlaloc, birthed by the waters flowing from the mountains. The olny time that the waters are tampered with is after a successful campaign of war, when prisoners of war are sacrificed upon the Temple of Tlaloc and the blood poured into the aqueducts. As well as the classic Jaguar and Eagle warriors, the natives of the island also form an ocean inspired warrior caste that I have yet to find any appropriate theme for.
The character I have in mind, Yaotl, was chosen at the prime of his warrior's life to become the sentinel of the cove, living in a small shrine-like structure on the cliffs surrounding the Atlmomoztli and making sure outsiders are dealt with swiftly and ruthlessly. The sentinel is also the only one except the priests of Tlaloc who may lay eyes on the alluring creatures, although he is forbidden from speaking with them. Having spent years now in solitude watching over them as they swim around in the cove, he is longing for their company. Surely they must have seen him when he walked along the cliffs looking down on them. But one stormy night he sees fire on the horizon of the ocean, two large shadows clashing until only one remains. As the ocelots cried out before the sunrise, the bad omen was made worse. The two shadows of course being a pirate ship sinking a galleon. Who knows how Yaotl will react to a potential castaway.
Just my own ideas so far, it was a fun exercise that had me scrounging through my old university tomes again.
