Editing Degenesis (section)

===Chroniclers===
Before the Eshaton, all media had unified into a single entity known as the Stream. Imagine that the internet had successfully swallowed up television, cinema, books, gaming and every other form of media and that's exactly what the Stream is, a global network of information that has merged with every aspect of civilized life. The hardcore nerds of the day who lived and breathed the Stream, who couldn't stand the idea of a world without it, were the Streamers. They innovated, collaborated and developed increasingly exciting ways of exploring the Stream.

Then the Eshaton came and the Stream crashed.

Many of the Streamers that survived across the world remained attached to the Stream despite the apocalypse. They had no stronger desire than to return to the days of the Stream, to reactivate it and have access to the sum of human knowledge once more. To begin with, their efforts were primitive. They hoarded all sorts of data storage devices, the sort of things that were useless without a real infrastructure. Many of them died alone among their piles of useless scrap, having never realized their dream of a reborn Stream. In Borca however, there were enough surviving Streamers that they were able to gather, pool their resources and construct a server hub and the infrastructure to power it. This became known as the Central Cluster, the place where the Stream was reborn.

But this rebooted Stream is a stunted, stillborn thing. Information that wasn't corrupted was locked away behind impassable security measures. The new goal of the Streamers was to acquire the means to unlock the full potential of this static Stream. One of their greatest finds in the pursuit of this goal was a computer museum near Cologne Cathedral, where they found a treasure trove, another extension of the Stream. They spent years sifting through the data, compiling it and learning from it.

Then the Anabaptists came. They saw Cologne Cathedral as a holy place, a fount from which one of the four rivers must surely spring. So they sent in their orgiastics, butchered the strange technology-worshiping heretics and smashed their evil machines, foul relics of the Bygone world responsible for corruption of man. The Streamers scurried back to the Central Cluster, easily defeated. After all, they were just a collection of tech-obsessed looters, they weren't fighters. To survive in the post-Eshaton world, they would need to find a way to defend themselves.

In the end, they decided that the best defense and offense was intimidation, not force. The Streamers donned inhuman masks with voice modulators that made them look and sound like strange machine-gods. When intimidation fails, these voice modulators even function as nonlethal weaponry, capable of magnifying the Streamer's voice and transforming it into a thunderous blast. In addition to this, the Streamers also developed a currency known as drafts, the first that had been seen in Europe since the Eshaton. The Streamers, who had re-imagined themselves as 'Chroniclers,' gradually manipulated cults and clans alike into becoming dependent on drafts, even in regions where the Chroniclers have no presence. They engineered Europe's economy and they had total control over it, up until this very day.

So that's what the Chroniclers are today. Mysterious masked men clothed in drab robes, with voices like thunder and a lust for technology that will allow them to rekindle the glory of the Bygone world, armed with their voice modulators and a steely grip on Europe's economy. If you deliver functional Stream technology to the Central Cluster, you will be made rich beyond your wildest dreams, but they still pay good drafts for even the simplest things, such as scrap metal and plastic.