When Lake Michigan's shoreline shifted and the old harbor infrastructure partially flooded, a lot of valuable material went underwater or got buried in silt. The Lakebed Scrapers make their living pulling it back out. They're a scavenger gang of roughly sixty people operating out of a half-sunken warehouse complex near what used to be the Museum Campus. They dive the flooded basements and submerged streets of the old lakefront, strip abandoned buildings in the ruins south of the Loop, and pick through industrial waste sites that nobody else is desperate or crazy enough to enter.

The Scrapers aren't fighters by preference. They're engineers, divers, and junk traders who happen to live in a world where salvage rights are enforced with pipe wrenches and jury-rigged stun guns. Their real value is knowledge — they have detailed mental maps of every accessible ruin, flooded tunnel, and collapsed structure within five kilometers of the lakefront. They know where the pre-collapse infrastructure is, what's still intact, and what's worth pulling out. Need a specific model of industrial servo? A case of pre-war antibiotics from a flooded pharmacy? Copper wiring from a condemned substation? The Scrapers probably know where it is and can get it for a price.

The crew is loosely organized around dive teams of four to six, each led by a veteran scraper who knows their particular territory. There's no single leader — decisions are made by a consensus of team leads, which makes them slow to act collectively but hard to decapitate.