Paulie, aka Tone, is a Terran artist renting a roomshare out of a cozy apartment tucked away in the twinkling lights of Titan's E-District. One of the founding members of the Ring City Wreckers, Paulie is boneheaded and arrogant to a degree that friends have described as "impressive" and "worth studying by scientists or whatever." He buys into his own branding and lives his own hype, he's a once-in-a-generation creative prodigy and he knows it. Paulie's prideful personality and absence of humility has a tendency to rub people the wrong way; he is the protagonist of his own story and the hero never backs down from a challenge, and as such Paulie tends to pick a lot of fights he can't actually win. There's a lot of reasons the Wreckers get into a scrap with one of their rival graffiti crews, but Paulie's beak writing checks his friends need to cash is one of the top three on its own. He's ain't much in a fight but he doesn't care, his ego's too buffered by hype to ever be bruised. He'll never learn. He will do it again.
As a former student of Pewley Fuddsworth Technical High School, Paulie met Regina and the rest of the original Wreckers hanging out in the school's art room during study halls and after all his classes were done for the day. He always helped himself to the art supplies, drawing on the nicer cardstock he found in the print shop or laying his feathers on the nice texture the cold press watercolor paper from the art room has. The school's facilities allowed him to experiment with all kinds of tools, and he found himself really liking the bold colors he'd get from paint markers and acrylics. He used these spaces and his free access to all kinds of art media to explore different ideas about how shapes and colors could fit together, and he watched how other people used shape and color to realize their own ideas and tried to lift the bits he saw them put down on paper to use for his own ends. Paulie's arrogant, but he never took criticism poorly from his peers- they often had a point, and his work could only get stronger from getting inside the heads of his audience and learn how to dial things in and make a piece land with more impact. After the crew graduated from Pewley Fuddsworth, Paulie went on to art school to pursue a degree in Old Terran Media; he currently pays rent doing freelance illustration work and selling acrylic and oil paintings at the Night Markets that pop up regularly in the A-District.
Paulie writes under the name "Tone," a robust syllable that projects intensity and commands attention. Applying his formal art education to his street writing, Tone's work is always geometrically complex; he loves distorting perspective and building three-dimensionality out of bold, high-contrast values. While most of his friends tend to put ideas down on normal blank-paper sketchbooks or lined notebooks, Tone likes to get the fancy grid-paper sketchbooks to build up his ideas in before they go up on a wall, a point he often brings up when he's talking shop with his friends. "Oh, yeah, those kinds of designs are great, but have you seen the sketchbooks with the gridlines on them? Really lets you plot your vanishing points with better precision." Other writers see him as a bit of a showoff, as he's never willing to put his tag up in "too easy of a style," and if he can achieve a level of abstraction that gives even seasoned writers a hard time decyphering what it says, he'll be happy. That's his goal, that's his brass ring. They won't have to be able to read it, they'll see the twisting, geometrically-sound vortex of linear dimensionality and know that Tone was here. Having a complex and striking style isn't enough on its own if no one can see it, so Tone is always on the lookout for high-up spots no one else can reach, and thus no one else can put their own tags overtop of his hard work. People- mostly other Terrans- often mistake Tone for a Medileer Neptunian, and he always has to correct them that, no, he's a regular Terran, and that's a really important distinction to make. Sure, he's got a beak and feathers just like a Neptunian, but while the Medileer can only use their bodies to glide in the air, Tone can actually fly under his own power, if only for a modest distance. He'll load up a backpack with paint cans, wear it backwards on his chest, flap his arms and get himself up to some inaccessible bit of space colony infrastructure and spend a night putting up his tag in big bold twisting blocks of color. The key difference between Tone and a Neptunian that lets him fly where they can only glide is he has hollow bones, a trait that also makes him a much less-capable fighter for all the scraps he gets himself into. Fortunately he has friends to make up for his lack of mass or constitution, and the lumbering dimwits who hate seeing his name can't get up to the spots he puts it to cover it up themselves. They gotta sit there and look at it. Stupid meathoofs!
The Ring City Wreckers have a couple spots they like to hit up to meet and chill or work on their art together in, usually derelict buildings slated for decommission and reconstruction, but they're never in one spot for too long. The art room at PS-21 may have disappeared, but the spirit of a shared creative space is something that can haunt anything with four posts and a roof. Paulie is always keeping an eye out for new potential spots for the Wreckers to inhabit, often staking out a prime space while he's working a Night Market setup selling his paintings and reporting his ideas back to Regina. The two of them will usually check a space out together, to see how accessible it is for a nimble avian Terran or a denser and more grounded Martian to get to. Just like their old art room, the crew knows any space they have is fleeting, so even when they've got a secure spot picked out, they always maintain a shortlist of places to move to next after circumstances inevitably push them out of their hideout. It ain't never a big deal, the Wreckers will just scoop a new couch off the curb somewhere, string up some lights and hook a TV set up to a portable battery. Bingo bango, new spot's secured. He may be arrogant and a bit of a pill, but Paulie makes sure the Ring City Wreckers always got a secret lair to plot and scheme from.