DAS Secretary Ruby Tomas

Child psychologist by education, grade school teacher by trade, and most powerful woman in the world by accident, Ruby Tomas, née Middenborough, is the current Secretary of the Disputatious Assembly of Sovereigns. The position fell to her when her husband, the late DAS Secretary Edvard Tomas, fell ill before dying of cancer in AES 981. During the late Secretary's decline in health, his wife increasingly aided him in performing his duties; by the time he died, she was essentially running the Assembly in his name. She proved so adept to the task that nobody wanted to be the one to point out that she had never been officially elected. The Assembly notaries let the situation lie for a year, then decided just to put her election down as unanimous.

The main reason for Tomas' success during her tenure as Secretary is her experience dealing with children as a grade school teacher. Normally, international diplomacy has less petty bickering and fewer fistfights, but the Disputatious Assembly of Sovereigns is anything but normal. It isn't called the Disputatious Assembly for nothing, and not just because Selestei is there. Many sovereigns rankle at the condescension displayed at times by the Secretary, but complaining means you lose your gold star for the week, and only those who kept their stars for the month get homemade cookies. Even worse, if you misbehave too much, you get sent to the Time-Out Corner where the sovereigns of the Careless Continent are constantly trying to kill each other. This largely keeps the other Sovereigns in order, less because it would be dangerous and more because it would be embarrassing.

The Time-Out Corner doesn't work on everyone, though. The last time Tomas sent King Daggert of Selestei to the Corner, he joined in on the fighting, causing even more of a commotion than before. Conversely, when High Exarch Minor Ironheart of Flandre was sent to the Corner, the Careless sovereigns sat completely still out of fear of what happened last time. The Secretary was so pleased with the result that she returned Ironheart's gold star for the week. Ever since, Assembly staff have suspected that the Secretary is encouraging the High Exarch Minor to cause trouble and get caught so she can be sent to the Corner when the Careless sovereigns are too distracting.

Hand in hand with her fearsome maintenance of Assembly decorum is Tomas' close involvement with the various committees and offices of the Assembly. Very little goes on on campus that she does not know about. She makes a point of sitting in on each committee's official meetings around once a month, as well as observing individual members at work outside of meetings. She's standing behind me right now, in fact. Hello, Secretary Tomas. Yes, I'm getting work done. No, I'm not writing anything bad about you. Sweet, gold star.