I'm back! I've had some crazy weeks, with school and other stories and a family vacation, but the chapter is done and it is ready for your viewing pleasure. Enjoy!

(Disclaimer - see Chapter 1)

Chapter 8:

Trust Your Instincts

At least now we had a plan – well, sort of a plan. We didn't know exactly what we needed to do yet, but I had shown enough potential for Wyldstyle and Vitruvius to be on board. Now all we had to do was figure out how I could use that potential and become a Master Builder.

As nearly anybody could guess, I had no idea how to do that.

What we did know to do was call the Master Builders. Vitruvius built little bluebirds out of bricks and sent them off to an internet café to alert the crew that it was time for…well, whatever the finding of the Piece meant.

"Where are we going to meet the Builders?" I asked.

"Cloud Cuckoo Land," Vitruvius said bluntly.

"Wait, Cloud Cuckoo what? What about my training?" Looking back, that seemed a little selfish, but I needed to know how to be a Master Builder in order to save one – or the entire group of them.

"Your training begins now," Vitruvius said. He was about to say more when we heard a knock at the door.

"Hey, Piano Man! Come out and play us a song tonight!" a robotic voice said.

"Your training begins later!" Vitruvius said. Quickly, he and Wyldstyle opened up a hatch on the ceiling of the apartment.

"We're going in on three!" the voice said.

Vitruvius stretched his hand out, and I grabbed it as he pulled me up, just before an explosion rocked the room.

I grabbed the ledge of the hatch and pulled myself up, sighing with relief.

"I think we're in the clear," Wyldstyle said.

Suddenly, we heard another voice from below us. "Freeze, turkeys!" it said.

Oh, no, I thought. I knew that voice too well. Cringing, I turned to see the source of the voice.

Sure enough, Bad Cop was standing there, surrounded by an army of President Business's robots.

"Oh, joy," I whispered to myself.

"All we want is the Piece of Resistance," Bad Cop's said, his voice sounding like gravel.

"We would rather he died than give it to you!" Wyldstyle said, rather bravely. But I was in no mood for being brave.

"I would not rather he died," I piped up from behind Wyldstyle.

"Look, guys," he said, and I saw his sunglasses twitch. "We can do this the easy way, or we can do it –"

Wyldstyle ran away, holding on to Vitruvius, before Bad Cop could say anything more.

"They took the hard way! Fire!"

Around me, red lasers flooded the sky. I ran as quickly as I could after Wyldstyle and Vitruvius, trying to dodge the lasers around me.

"Which way to Cloud Cuckoo Land?" Wyldstyle asked. I couldn't help but be impressed by how she was in mortal danger and she still felt free to ask such a simple question.

"There's some sort of thing in the sky – it's been a while since I've seen it – we go through that," Vitruvius explained the best he could.

"You mean the sun?" I asked.

Vitruvius nodded. "Yes, that's it."

Suddenly, I noticed that Wyldstyle had balanced a bunch of bricks in her arms. She started zooming around the bricks, somehow making some sort of hang glider.

"Use this!" she called back to me, throwing me the hang glider.

"Whoa!" I said, examining the device. Suddenly, I heard a noise behind me. I turned – but before I could see anything, I felt a hand – Wyldstyle's hand – grab my wrist and pull me off a building. Frantic, I tried to flap the "wings" of Wyldstyle's glider, but I felt gravity start to take over.

"I don't know what I'm doing!" I cried.

Suddenly, I heard a snap from above me, and when I looked up, the hang glider wasn't there. One of the robots' lasers must've hit the glider, and I started falling to the ground of The Old West.

The only thing to break my fall was a tank of water, and as soon as the three of us landed in it, it tumbled, spewing us all over the ground. Vitruvius and I found ourselves surrounded by a circle of pigs. As quickly as I could, I grabbed a wire and rounded up the pigs, calling for Wyldstyle to help us and trying to calm the pigs down. But it didn't work – and that's when I saw the robot.

It looked feminine, with a blond wig and a blood-red dress, but it was a robot, which doesn't really have a gender. A laser gun was in its hand, and it raised it as I tried to turn the pigs.

Thankfully, the front of the building collapsed on the robot, decapitating it. When I looked up, I could barely see Wyldstyle on top of an abomination of bricks and wheels. I threw her the wire, and she grabbed it, making the pigs like the reindeer to her sleigh. (Well, she didn't actually have a sleigh, but you get the picture."

The pigs galloped forward as Vitruvius and I climbed onto the vehicle. The vehicle was fast – but not fast enough to be within eyesight of the robots.

"Vitruvius, build something!" Wyldstyle called from the front of the vehicle.

"Let's let Emmet try!" he said. My eyes widened.

"No, let's not let Emmet try!" I begged. "I don't have any training!"

"It starts now," Vitruvius said matter-of-factly. "Lesson 1: Trust your instincts!"

I looked back at the racing army of robots. Quickly, I grabbed two bricks that were flying through the air, snapped them together, and threw them at the robots.

It stuck to the ground, and the robots didn't even realize it was there.

"Unless your instincts are terrible," Vitruvius said, obviously a little disappointed.

"Look out!" Wyldstyle yelled.

I ducked, and a laser flew right over me. Relieved, I stood back up – and was immediately thrown back to the bottom of the vehicle.

When I could see straight again, I could see that one of the wheels had been shot off of the vehicle. I grabbed it from the air, but the axle was gone, too – the wheel couldn't stay on the vehicle otherwise.

"I can't control it much longer!" Wyldstyle cried, her voice strained.

"We need to attach the wheel to something that spins around," Vitruvius said calmly, not realizing the danger ahead of us. Just in front of the vehicle, I could see a cliff – an extremely steep cliff that we could easily end up at the bottom of.

I tried to think about what we could use that could spin around freely, and the thought made me dizzy. Then I realized that my dizziness was due to the fact that thanks to me thinking, my head was literally spinning.

My head was literally spinning.

I grabbed the hair on my head and yanked it off, cringing a little bit. The wheel went on my head, and I crawled down to where the axle would be, planting my feet firmly.

"Emmet!" Wyldstyle called. "What are you…?"

"I got this," I called back, closing my eyes to make myself less dizzy.

Suddenly, I felt myself start to go straight instead of in circles. The plan had worked!

"You did it, Emmet!" I heard Vitruvius say. When I opened my eyes, he was hugging one of the pigs – he must've thought that the pig was me.

"Wow," Wyldstyle said in awe. "You actually did – TRAIN!"

Suddenly, I felt myself flip up into the air, and I did what I always did when I was flipped into the air – I started screaming my lungs out. I grabbed my hair from the flying parabola of vehicle wreckage and put it back on my head.

When the world finally stopped flipping, I was sitting on top of a train car – presumably the train we had crashed into.

"Oh, no," Wyldstyle said.

When I looked to where she was looking, I understood why she was worried. Riding the top of the train was Bad Cop in his police car.

"Get off my train!" he yelled.

"Run!" Wyldstyle called to us.

As quickly as we could, we started running away from Bad Cop. I grabbed Vitruvius's hand to make sure he didn't fall off.

Suddenly, I saw a laser racing towards Wyldstyle, and I jumped in front of her to save her. As soon as the laser so much as touched the back of my leg, searing pain racked my body.

"OWWWWW!" I yelled. Wyldstyle wrapped me in her arms to comfort me, but she was shaking in fear. It reminded me of when she was telling the story of President Business's tyranny – how she had shivered as if a bad memory had come to mind.

"He's going to ram us," Wyldstyle said, staring ahead at Bad Cop's car. "We need to build a ramp!"

As quickly as she could, Wyldstyle gathered up a bunch of loose pieces from the train cars and built a ramp. When Bad Cop's car hit it, he flew off of the train, towards a crocodile-filled river below us.

But then it somehow turned into a plane. Of course it had to turn into a plane.

"Rest in pieces," he yelled out to us. Fire (presumably from the car/plane) appeared on the train tracks ahead of us, wrecking the bricks.

"Oh, no," Wyldstyle said. She was very fond of saying that.

And then the train began to fall – down, down, down towards the moat. Time almost seemed to slow down.

"Hey," Wyldstyle said. "Thanks for saving my life back there. Even if, well, it turned out to be pointless."

I smiled at her. "Well, for what it's…for what it's worth, this has been…uh, probably the greatest fifteen minutes of my life."

We reached out our hands, wanting to be together as we were eaten by crocodiles. But before our hands touched, I felt myself hit a different kind of ground.

"Relax, everybody, I'm here," a gravelly voice from nearby said.

When I sat up, I realized that Vitruvius and Wyldstyle and I were in some sort of spaceship – and the man in front of us, the man controlling the spaceship, was Batman.

"What's up, babe?" Batman said to Wyldstyle.

My eyes widened.

"What?" I said, utterly confused.

"Oh, sorry, Emmet," Wyldstyle said. "Batman, this is my friend Emmet. Emmet, this is my boyfriend, Batman."

"I'm Batman," he said.

"He's your boyfriend?" I said. For some reason, I took an immediate dislike to him. I wasn't sure exactly why, but he didn't seem like the kind of person Wyldstyle would like. At least now I understood what Wyldstyle meant when she said that I didn't want to mess with him.

"How did you guys meet?" I asked.

"Well, uh, it's actually a funny story – right…"

She turned to Batman, but he was gone.

"What's going on?" Vitruvius asked. Apparently, he was just as confused as I was.

"He's down there!" Wyldstyle said, turning the ship on autopilot and leaning forward to watch Batman. From the looks of it, he was on Bad Cop's plane, fighting the policeman himself.

"Police to meet you, Bad Cop," he said. I couldn't help but cringe at the pun.

It didn't seem like Bad Cop himself liked it, either. "The pleasure is all spine!" he said, trying to fight Batman.

Suddenly, the bricks of the plane were reassembled – probably by Batman. He stood on top of the plane – which now resembled some sort of a baby carriage – as it fell into the river, Bad Cop jumping out to save his life.

"Oh, no, your boyfriend's gone," I said with mock sympathy. To my surprise, she didn't seem that upset. I wondered why, but then I heard something from the pilot's seat.

"Hey, babe," Batman said.

"Babe!" Wyldstyle said, overjoyed. She grabbed his hand, and they stared at the sunset – which we were flying directly towards.

"Hey, uh, guys? I think we're about to fly into the sun," I said, pointing out the obvious.

"Yeah, but it's going to look really cool," Batman said.

And in a flash, we burst through the sun, leaving a hole in the shape of a bat. Man, was he egotistical.

I had been too scared during the travel from Bricksburg to the Old West to notice what the interior of the tunnels actually looked like, but now that I was safe (or as safe as I could be, seeing that I was the number one criminal in the world and had the one weapon that could make the Master Builder rebellion win), I was able to appreciate how the tunnels worked. Bricks of every shape and color surrounded the "spaceship," the bright white ones almost glowing. The ship turned corner after corner, even though I couldn't see a single one coming. Finally, it dipped down, and a beautiful green field spread itself out in front of the ship.

"Where are we?" I asked. Of course, as soon as I said it, I noticed the words Middle Zealand written in the sky in front of us. Vitruvius started talking about all of the things that the place was famous for – a bunch of crazy things. My focus drifted to a red thing in the sky – about the same color as the Piece. As it grew larger and we got closer, I could make out a head, and wings, and a tail, and –

And fire, coming out of the head.

"Dragon!" I screamed, and the ship dipped down as we narrowly missed colliding with the beast.

Batman pressed a button near the front of the ship as we neared the ground, and black bricks around me started moving. The ship had become a car, which was presently traversing the rocky ground in the forest.

"Okay, so Emmet," Vitruvius said, "once we get to Cloud Cuckoo Land –"

"Yeah, yeah, anyway," Batman interrupted. "You guys have to check out the new subwoofers I installed in the back. I call them the dogs. Check them out!"

Suddenly, the speakers seemed to explode with sound – a heavy metal song, from the sound of it, even though I could barely hear Batman's gravelly voice singing over the instruments. I could see Wyldstyle lip-syncing along in the front.

"This is the one I wrote for Wyldstyle!" Batman said from the front. "It's about how I'm an orphan."

Wyldstyle smirked and turned back in her seat to face me. "Batman's a true artist, Emmet – you know, dark and brooding and stuff."

Yelling to make myself heard, I said, "Well, I can be dark and brooding, too!"

Suddenly, I saw a beautiful array of lights in front of us. Color after color flooded the sky, and it was too gorgeous not to share.

I peeked my head out the window. "Hey guys, look! A rainbow!"

Batman shook his head in disgust, and Wyldstyle rolled her eyes. Vitruvius almost jumped out of his seat next to me. "That's it!" he said. "That's our way to Cloud Cuckoo Land! Drive up the rainbow."

A few seconds later, we went up the steepest incline I had ever travelled in my life. I had never seen a ramp like that in Bricksburg, and it was slightly unsettling.

Thankfully, the ramp eventually rounded and became parallel with the ground, calming my stomach. At the top was a humongous cloud that seemed to be made out of bricks.

"I'll perform the secret knock," Vitruvius said as I helped him up to an alcove in the door. He knocked on the door with his staff. Once.

And somehow the alcove opened in a burst of light. When I stumbled into the light, I saw a world unlike anything I'd ever seen before.

I hope you enjoyed the story! Thanks for sticking with me. I won't be able to guarantee a chapter a week anymore, but I will try to get chapters out still. This story isn't over yet!

Feel free to review, but please no negative reviews or cursing. (And please, NOTHING POLITICAL!) Also, please no reviews asking for another chapter - I'll get one out when I get one out. Thanks!