"The most promising and original writer of fantasy to come along since Robin McKinley."—Peter S. Beagle, best-selling author of The Last Unicorm Damiana is safe-keeper in the small village of Tambleham. Neighbors and strangers alike come one by one, in secret, to tell her things they dare not share with anyone else, knowing that Damiana will keep then to herself. One late night, a mysterious visitor from the city arrives with an unusual secret for the Safe-Keeper—a newborn baby. Damiana, who is expecting her own child, agrees to take the foundling. She names him Reed and raises him side by side with her daughter, Fiona. Ad the years pass and the two children grow into teenagers, they must come to terms with who they are—and who they may be.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th Pacific Rim International Workshop on Multi-Agents, PRIMA 2006, held in Guilin, China, in August 2006. The book presents 39 revised full papers and 57 revised short papers together with 4 invited talks, addressing subjects from theoretical and methodological issues to applications. Topics include agent models, agent architectures, agent-oriented software engineering, semantic Web service, collaboration, coordination and negotiation, and more.

Whatever had destroyed the dinosaurs was approaching Earth again. 20 extraordinary people find that they have 4 years to prevent a catastrophe, but they know that the administration will not believe them, from previous experience. When their 4-year-older timeline connects with them in a bid to prevent the annihilation of Earth in their timeline, they are elated. However, when the older timeline stops responding after a while, they assume that it has succumbed. Their stumbling journey to prevent the catastrophe takes them to Africa and then the Pacific Islands. However, they are up against a technology that was far more advanced even 66 million years ago. In desperation, they reach out eight generations into their own past, risking their present to find a solution. Do they succeed, or does humanity go extinct the way the dinosaurs did?

ThisbookpresentsselectedandrevisedpapersoftheSecondWorkshoponAd- tive and Learning Agents 2009 (ALA-09), held at the AAMAS 2009 conference in Budapest, Hungary, May 12. The goalof ALA is to provide an interdisciplinaryforum for scientists from a variety of ?elds such as computer science, biology, game theory and economics. This year’s edition of ALA was the second after the merger of the former wo- shops ALAMAS and ALAg. In 2008 this joint workshop was organized for the ?rst time under the ?ag of both events. ALAMAS was a yearly returning Eu- pean workshop on adaptive and learning agents and multi-agent systems (held eight times). ALAg was the international workshop on adaptive and learning agents, which was usually held at AAMAS. To increase the strength, visibility and quality of the workshop it was decided to merge both workshops under the ?ag of ALA and to set up a Steering Committee as an organizational backbone. This book contains six papers presented during the workshop, which were carefully selected after an additional review round in the summer of 2009. We therefore wish to explicitly thank the members of the Program Committee for the quality and sincerity of their e?orts and service. Furthermore we would like to thank all the members of the senior Steering Committee for making this workshop possible and supporting it with sound advice. We also thank the AAMAS conference for providing us a platform for holding this event. Finally we also wish to thank all authors who responded to our call-for-papers with interesting contributions.

When Reuben discovers an old pocket watch, he soon realizes it holds an incredible power: it can turn you invisible for fifteen minutes. And the watch's power is even more extraordinary than he knows. Soon, he's on the run from a despot determined to possess it for himself ...