Queen of Hearts

The Queen of Hearts is the official title of the reigning monarch of The United Kingdom of Wonderland. First established during The Second Age, this hereditary title has been passed down from mother to daughter ever since.

Roles & Responsibilities

Since the creation of the title, the Queen of Hearts’ primary responsibility has been to determine whose heads shall be removed from their bodies for offenses against the crown. Though in recent years the Queen’s elected counterpart, the so-called “King” of Hearts, has taken to pardoning nearly all offenders—a sensible move, given the Queen’s predilection for shouting “off with his/her/their” head at nearly anyone who tries her patience—a pronouncement of guilt in the early days of the United Kingdom was nearly always followed by a swift beheading.

Beyond determining who shall be beheaded, the Queen is also responsible for determining the method by which the condemned will be separated from their noggin. The axe and the sword are the easiest implements to come by, but many Queens—including the first—grew suddenly patient when presented with the opportunity to march the condemned to the kingdom’s only guillotine in far-off Yesterland.

Other roles and responsibilities include the appointment of regional governors, resolving disputes between the constituent states of the kingdom, and the refereeing of the Queen’s Cup Final—the culminating event of the Wonderland Croquet season.

Most Queens take this last responsiblity quite seriously, some of them even more seriously than they take their role in the nation’s beheadings.

Requirements

1. Be a genetic descendant of Frieda Jacobs, the first Queen of Hearts.
2. Be a woman.
3. Be alive. The Undone are inelligible.

Succession

In the most typical scenario, the dead Queen’s eldest living daughter inherits the crown. If the Queen has no living daughters at the time of her death, the crown passes instead to the eldest living daughter of her eldest daughter. If the Queen gave birth to no daughters at all, the throne may pass through a son (either living or dead) to one of his daughters.

If the Queen has no children whatsoever, the crown passes to the eldest of her sisters or the eldest daughter of her eldest brother. If the Queen has no living siblings and if those siblings have no living female descendants at the time of the Queen’s passing, the crown then passes through the Queen’s aunts or uncles, looking for a living female head to sit upon.

And I think you get the gist from there.

In the unlikely event that there is no living head for the crown to sit upon, the DNA of Frieda Jacobs is used to create a clone and begin the process again.

Origin

During the Second Age, Frieda Jacobs united the various southern kingdoms of Eden as part of the War of Western Aggression. A charismatic leader who had survived an assassination attempt by the neighboring Ninth Empire of Oz, Jacobs had no trouble in raising an army to defend the southern kingdoms. And after the war, as word spread of Jacobs’ supposed descent from all seven of the south’s legendary woodland princesses, popular support swelled for a united kingdom with Jacobs at its head.