hello!! thought I’d ask, are there any hobbies the volnovskys have?
Yaroslav: Chess, tennis, golfing, reading, and oddly enough crafting miniatures. He used to make realistic furniture for his daughter's dollhouses and at lesser times toy cars and toy fish for his son. He taught the two how to play chess, with his daughter being the closest person to beat him. He also has a huge collection of ships in bottles that he crafted himself and has a lot of pride for. Yknow, these damn things
They're all sitting on shelves at the beach house in his study room (until his son broke into the house post-banishment and wrecked his belongings). He's irritatingly talented at all of his hobbies and any new ones he pick up.
Verochka: Baking and cooking, she loves making tasty surprises for the people she loves. Merfolk view cooking differently than humans in the sense that it is not treated like a necessary life skill to have and treated more like a leisurely activity (because well, they don't cook underwater. That's not a thing for merfolk). It's also something she looks back at fondly because Yaroslav introduced her to these activities when they first started dating. She didn't visit the surface often in her childhood due to her focus being more on her family's farm, until Yaroslav took her to dates up there.
She also likes making jewelry. As a child she used broken pieces of seashells scattered around her farm to make necklaces and bracelets for herself. Now she has much more expensive material to work with. She makes jewelry for the family and sells them to others
Kapka: A lot of her hobbies were picked up by her father because she grew up doing them together with him. She loves to read, is fantastic at chess, and crafts miniatures. She likes to make replicas of the animals she admires and hang em up on her wall. She used to watch her dad make the dollhouse furniture for her and paint with him, brings her happy memories
The only hobbies she has that doesn't involve her father is her care of her pets. In fact, that's more of Verochka's department. One of the few times she has the chance to bond with her daughter is when she teached her animal husbandry from her experience growing up in her farm.
Typically the servants are supposed to maintain the pets, but Kapka insists them to let her do it herself. She has many different pets scattered throughout the palace, including but not limited to her giant spider crab, her two barracudas, her nurse sharks, mantis shrimp, and various of reef fish that live in the anemone garden outside. Its her favorite spot to read and relax at. She loves her clownfish. She also writes sometimes, either in her journal about her nature findings or her diary
Osip: I aint gonna lie my gf asked me the same question and my mind ran blank. Osip is one of those typa people that drops a hobby if hes not immediately good at it because hes an impatient bastard, so it's hard to think of something. He is skilled at anything involving sleight of hand and dexterity. I can imagine him having a guilty pleasure over magic tricks like he was a child again. Pretty good at card tricks and party tricks involving his cigarettes too, usually done to woo the ladies. You know hes gonna tie the cherry stem in his mouth so many damn times