NEW MERCY – King Adam has signed a decree annexing into Überstadt the apartment he shares with Queen Laurel, naming it New Mercy and designating it as the Kingdom’s capital.
New Mercy, surrounded by Boston, USA, is Überstadt’s first territory outside the Seattle metropolitan area and its first territory annexed since 2014. The last change in national capital occurred in 2013, when Rosewood joined Überstadt and assumed the status.
The new capital is the first exercise of a theory being developed by the King and other Überstadti leaders that allows for sovereign claims over portions of buildings without necessarily claiming the underlying land, a departure from traditional Westphalian sovereignty that sometimes occurs de facto in urban small nations. Anticipating the Kingdom’s further urbanization, Parliament allowed this type of claim in an act passed earlier this year.
New Mercy is named for Mercy House of the Jesuit Volunteer Corps in Seattle, where Queen Laurel lived during a service year and where Their Majesties conducted much of their courtship.
The King’s decree makes New Mercy, formally a barony, part of the newly-formed Sophia County and Duchy of Massachusetts. The county is named for the classical personification of wisdom in a nod to the royal couple’s academic pursuits, while the duchy is named for the surrounding U.S. state of Massachusetts and the region’s indigenous Massachusett people.
The Occidental Chronicle 