"Mama, do you have your knitting packed?" Elizabeth Tucker asked as she scurried into her parent's bedroom. The family was helping the older couple pack for their trip into space.

"Yes it's in my carryon," Catherine said flustered. She had gotten Trip's letter with not only T'Pol's colors but her sizes as well. He'd asked that she make T'Pol a pair of slippers and a wrap to help keep his fiancé warm when she was off duty as the ship was too cold for Vulcans as they came from a desert planet. The ship was perfect for Humans but environmental conditions that were good for her weren't good for Humans. She'd always told him that those ships were too cold for people.

She laid the carefully made and wrapped gifts in her suitcase. She had made a robe in a cross between the Vulcan fashion and something she'd seen in a museum once. She had chosen the softest, warmest fabric she could find, one guaranteed to hold in the heat. Then she had used the scraps to make a pair of slippers. Now she was working on a pair of socks made from baby alpaca yarn. While the robe and slippers were a royal blue color, the yarn was a variegated color that ran from a pale red through the color spectrum to a deep blue and back. She hoped T'Pol liked them.

Elizabeth was carrying the wedding quilt that her mother's quilting group had worked on. They had all been shocked when Catherine had announced the news of her son's engagement to a Vulcan woman he'd been serving with for the past six months. That hadn't stopped any of them from joining in to make the wedding quilt. Elizabeth had looked up Vulcan designs, trying to find something that would help her design something that would truly symbolize her brother's marriage. She had found the IDIC design. That was now worked in every other block in Earth's blue and roses in the desert colors of Vulcan were worked in the rest. She knew Trip would like it. She only hoped that T'Pol would as well.

"Is your father ready?" Catherine asked.

"Yes mama, he's waiting outside. The transport will be here any minute. He doesn't have any time to get involved fixing anything," Elizabeth soothed.

Catherine Tucker shuddered. She loved her husband with every fiber of her being but the simple fact was the man couldn't keep his hands out of machinery. And he always got dirty doing it too. Trip was the same way, had been from the time he could pick up his father's tools. "Here," she shoved the suitcase at her youngest. "Give those to him and make sure he has one of those engineering journals to keep him busy." She hurriedly packed the quilt and followed her daughter out to the front porch. Minutes later the Tucker children and grandchildren were waving goodbye as Charles and Catherine Tucker left to travel to their son's wedding.

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"This is completely unacceptable. If news of this breaks out it will undermine all that we have done for the past century." A Vulcan sat in a shadowed chair surrounded by other Vulcans. "We must undermine her reputation and silence her. She cannot be allowed to present her facts to the Vulcan people at large. If the public finds out about the listening post or her Pudvel-tor katelau with a Human they will demand a closer look at our dealings with Humans and other races. Our plans to return to the old ways and reunite with the Sundered will be destroyed. We must destroy her before she can destroy us." The others gathered in the room nodded.

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While Trip was reading about Vulcans, T'Pol was doing her own research with the help of Hoshi. Although she had some time to study, between her duties as First Officer and Science Officer, it wasn't as much as she would like. In addition she knew that there were subtleties to an alien culture that she simply could not learn on her own. She had to have help from someone who had learned the cultural significance from the age of a small child. "I do not understand this custom of 'engagement' Hoshi."

It had taken a detailed explanation from Hoshi of how in Human culture the type of mentoring position she was being asked to fill for T'Pol required an exchange of intimate information and thus it was important for them to use each other's first names before T'Pol would stop calling her Ensign. Hoshi considered that she had succeeded quite a feat. "The engagement period is to allow both families time to plan for the wedding and for the couple to grow closer if they follow the traditions of not engaging in physical intimacy before marriage. It is rather like the first year of a Vulcan marriage. As we are having the wedding here on Enterprise, your engagement is mostly just to allow time for your respective families to get here. We can actually have a wedding within 48 hours but that is considered to be extremely rushed, almost as bad as eloping."

"And eloping is bad," T'Pol concluded.

"Eloping is running off to get married and it depends upon the circumstances," Hoshi explained. "If you have at the very least cordial relations with your families, it is very rude. Weddings are family affairs and the more you get along with your family the more important it is for at least some of them to be there. That is why on Earth big formal weddings can have up to several hundred people in attendance. If this was a war time situation where it wasn't possible for anyone to get here, we'd have a small ceremony here and then have another one or at least a big reception when we got home. As its only possible to transport your mother and Trip's parents, his parents will probably want to do that the next time we get leave on Earth. What we'll do is have a selection of off duty people from both your departments, the bridge officers and your parents as witnesses and Captain Archer will perform the ceremony." She took another bite of her ice cream and noticed that T'Pol seemed to be enjoying her vegetarian version of the treat. It looked like a girl's night in at T'Pol's quarters was a good idea. Maybe she could introduce the Vulcan woman to the concept of sleepovers one day.

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"Dangnabit T'Pol it ain't like that!" Trip stormed as they walked into the mess hall. The mess hall was about halfway filled with crew members and T'Pol's sensitive hearing picked up several people making bets for Hoshi to record. She had once brought up the subject with Captain Archer and had been shocked to find out that he had already known about the gambling. She knew that gambling was against the regulations but she still didn't understand how he could go along with it or allow the crew to gamble on the outcome of two of his senior officers discussions. She understood even less how the outcome of each discussion was decided. She had decided to ignore it as Captain Archer seemed to.

"It is my understanding that it is a long standing Human custom," she said as she accepted her plate from Trip. "As your own family participates in this custom I do not understand your aversion to it."

"I said no T'Pol and that's final!" Trip marched over to a table and pulled out a chair for her. Hoshi watched the two from her corner and silently collected the bets that were being whispered in her ear as crewmen filed past her on their way out of the mess hall. She also nodded to those waving fingers at her behind the two arguing officer's backs. She couldn't believe that they were arguing this in public but it was typical of them. Once they started arguing with each other they tended to forget just where they were or who was around them unless they were in danger. She wondered what the argument was about this time.

T'Pol looked at the chair Trip was holding out for her in disgust. "I am perfectly capable of pulling out my own chair Charles and as you do participate in your culture's customs I still do not see your difficulties with this one." She set down her plate and sat down in the chair.

Trip sat down on his side of the table. "Mama raising me to be a gentleman has absolutely nothing to do with this." He started poking his fork in his lunch to avoid waving it at her. "It ain't gonna happen so just forget about it and you aren't going to change the subject by not calling me Trip either."

"It is the custom in both your family and your culture. We will follow it." T'Pol began her meal.

"No we ain't T'Pol!" Trip took a few more bites before continuing. "I still don't know why we gotta do this now. It's gonna be years before it becomes important."

"It is important because if something is to happen to either of us the decision will already be recorded and it will be honored," T'Pol pointed out as she ate. "Deep space missions are dangerous. As soon as the first ceremony is completed we will be sending some of them back to Vulcan and Earth. They need names should something happen to us."

"I said no and why are we following Human tradition on this? Why aren't you pushing for Vulcan traditions?" Trip asked.

'Names? What sort of names are they talking about and what are they sending back to their home planets?' Hoshi wondered. She noticed that they were both eating as quickly as they could even as they argued. 'They must have to go back to their offices after lunch,' she thought. 'They won't have time for arguing then.'

"Vulcans have few traditions in this matter," T'Pol said matter of factly.

"So what? I say we go with Vulcan traditions not Human ones at least as far as this Human one goes," Trip said determinedly.

"We will follow this Human tradition," T'Pol said not budging an inch as she got up from the table, her soup finished.

Trip got up and followed her, his lunch done as well. They turned in their dishes and as they walked out of the mess hall Hoshi could clearly hear Trip say, "I don't care T'Pol. We aren't naming one of the boys Charles Tucker the Fourth!"