[MISSION] Of Pastel Colours and Ridiculously Cute Critters

Badfics exist for the most unexpected things – including a near-plotless series of web comics and instant messaging stickers about a rotund cat and other ridiculously cute animals.

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The fic cited in this story, titled "Pusheen The Cat" (no, really), belongs to EmsTheBae and they're welcome to keep or do anything they want with it. Pusheen the Cat, the actual canon, was created by Claire Belton and Andrew Duff.

The following text is a work of parody/satire that contains literary analysis.

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No one except FicPsych personnel knew what Inasuke's therapy consisted of, but he came out of it 1) better at this English thing than Urato, and 2) having developed a serious taste for incredibly beautiful and/or cute Western things.

Urato could no longer count how many times that petite, brown-haired friend of his pestered him into playing Blossom Blast, nor how many times he overheard the Disney Fairies movies playing from his room. When entering that room filled with plushes and other cute paraphernalia, there was a high chance one would catch Inasuke cooing in a diabetes-inducing high pitch to a cat-like mini who spoke in badly spelled baby talk. Urato hadn't yet entered a single badfic, but he felt like going insane every time he was exposed to his partner's saccharine antics.

Then one day Inasuke acted like he was about to explode from joy – he had just gotten a copy of the Japanese bilingual translation of I am Pusheen the Cat. He refused to stay put and was seemingly millimetres away from bouncing off the walls; he danced around his own room and even Urato's, knocking over several stacks of sports magazines and exercise equipments, squeeing all the while.

Urato had had enough. "C'mere right dis second, ya lil' piece o' shit!" he roared, cracking his knuckles. Sharing an RC with Inasuke was getting on his nerves all on its own, and he risked snapping completely if something wasn't done.

Fortunately for him – and unfortunately for Inasuke – the console in his room unleashed a timely [BEEEEEEP], putting an end to Inasuke's one-man party.

"Ugh, I never thought this thing can be this noisy," Inasuke muttered while wading through the mess in Urato's room to reach the console, not noticing the triumphant look in his partner's eyes. A quick read of the intel report later, the expression on Inasuke's face morphed from annoyance to complete and utter bafflement.

"Seriously? People actually write fanfiction for Pusheen? Not only that, bad fanfiction?" he said after an awkwardly long silence had passed. "Does this mean… we're finally going on our first mission? Ura-chan, start packing. We can't let this thing keep doing who-knows-what to the cutest thing to ever exist!"

"Ain't goin'! If ya wanna go, yer goin' by yerself!" Urato yapped. "Haven't ya nearly detonated my head with yer crap already? Don't drag me inta any more o' dat shit!"

"Then why did you sign up for this job? You want to protect fictional worlds from evil influence, now you get to protect fictional worlds from evil influence. What more do you want?"

"Dunno, a mission into somethin' less sickenin' maybe?" Urato refused to back down.

At this, Inasuke knew exactly what to say. Smirking a little and narrowing his blue eyes, he said in the most devilish voice he could muster, "Or I can go tell Hazama-sempai right this moment that you stepped on one of the sitting cushions in his RC, and with shoes on no less. Oh, how about I tell him you did something to Shigisawa-sempai? Don't worry, it won't take long; I can literally fall right into RC 381 any second…"

"Aight fine. I'm goin'," Urato had no choice but to groan, reluctantly reaching for his Bag of Holding.

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Pusheen's Life as an Early Kitten

Urato had never gone to hell, but already he could roughly know what it was like. All around the agents, the environment took the form of the interior of a cute house with cute furniture all in pastel shades; Inasuke disguised Urato and himself as a generic chubby dog and a generic kitten respectively. Inasuke looked as though his eyes were about to transform into pink hearts; everything resembled the official art style as closely as it could, and that brought him bottomless joy, whereas Urato looked as though he was about to empty his stomach.

But of course, that could likely be chalked up to the fic's gratuitously inserting [a host of GIFs from the official Pusheen website] inbetween the text.

Alas, the joy did not last long. Much to Ina-cat's dismay and Ura-dog's amusement, everything went south very quickly. [An image file that was simply the words "Pusheen the cat" on a pink background] appeared out of nowhere and squarely smacked Inasuke's face, wrenching from him a very loud cry. While Urato started toying with the image file on the floor, the fic began in all its inept glory, as the web series' heroine Pusheen sauntered onto the scene and started dancing, but a deal less cute and well-animated due to poor writing.

This is a book all about Pusheen the Cat about his family, life, food, love, owners and almost everything else about his life. So after you read every chapter go and let your cat! Maybe name it Pusheen!

"For crying out loud, what is this rubbish?" Inasuke nearly shrieked, his voice coming out as very whiny-sounding mews. No answers will be provided to queries as to why the formless narrator is able to understand and transcribe the disguised agents' dialogues. "Pusheen is female! We're not even a paragraph into the fic and already we have a humongous charge… Ura-chan! Are you listening to me? I said we have a charge!"

"Er, what?" Urato said dumbfoundedly, looking up from fiddling with [two more GIF images] that appeared seconds before.

"You need to note down the charges," Inasuke said, trying as hard as he could not to snap. "We're charging for misgendering Pusheen and overusing image files. You better hurry up, because I see a lot of other charges coming."

Not a second later, the fic's crude approximation of Pusheen was suddenly in a cardboard box alongside two identical clones of herself. This alone wouldn't amount to much, as this was exactly what was depicted in an official GIF; what really ticked Inasuke off was the Words that accompanied the scene.

In the photo up above the fist kitten from the left is his oldest brother, the middle is the youngest, and Pusheen is the last or the first on the right.

"Pusheen is the oldest child, which means she doesn't have an older brother! She has only one little brother, her sister isn't the youngest, and they look nothing like this! Charge for replacing the characters Stormy and Pip! Neither her mother nor her sister ever left the family, and she doesn't have an aunt either! Goodness me, this fic went to all that trouble pilfering GIFs from the official website, which houses all the information, yet it still gets everything wrong! This fic is going down, and in shreds!" Inasuke ranted as though a big scary switch was flipped in him. He was only short of shooting steam out of his ears from sheer irritation.

But unbeknownst to him, Urato had stopped bothering fishing out writing tools and had already tuned him out, lying flat on his back and sticking his paws up in the air. Let him have his rant, Urato decided. He was pretty much useless on this mission to a continuum he had zero knowledge or interest in; he might as well just lie down and wait until the pastel nightmare ended.

That was, until a hard object beaned his head, making him bark loudly from the sudden pain.

"Ow! What was dat for?" he barked at his feline partner.

"What? I didn't do anything!" Inasuke said. He then noticed the object lying on top of the image files next to Urato, no doubt the thing hitting his head earlier. Curious, he approached the thing and pawed at it; the object was a grey toy-sized bike-like vehicle. Then he noticed something in particular: the character string Pusheens was emblazoned on its side.

"A mini," Inasuke said, hastily dropping the first ever Pusheen the Cat mini, Pusheens the mini-This Thing, into the bag. "As if the fic isn't bad enough, it has to misspell adorable Pusheen's name. This is driving me cra…"

Before he finished, overbearingly weepy violin music started to play around them. Pusheen and her "brothers" began crying like in the hammiest melodrama; the Words were narrating a generic sob story family background about how the mother left the family and how difficult their financial situation was.

For a brief moment, Urato actually wanted to die.

Inasuke got his rant on again, "Pusheen doesn't have a plot, its characters aren't complex. It also doesn't have a ton of characters. It's literally just a cat and her family and friends doing random things, how can you get it wrong? All the information is right there on the official website, and yet…"

He was interrupted by another hard object appearing out of nowhere and hitting his head. This object however was something else: a small food can, no larger than a human child's palm, bearing a blue-and-white horizontal striped label with the character string Neko Autisumi printed on.

"An honest-to-gods mini for another continuum… Argh, this is it! Halt right there, whatever nefarious forces possessing Pusheen!" Inasuke abandoned all stealth and cried. "You are convicted by the Protectors of the Plot Continuum for mistaking Pusheen's gender; replacing her family; giving her a background that's too dramatic for the tone of the Pusheen series; littering the text with official GIFs; naming the fic the same as the official work; bad spelling and grammar; creating minis for multiple fandoms; and finally really bothering a PPC agent by ruining such a wonderfully cute and funny series. You are hereby sentenced to exorcism! Ura-chan… Ura-chan? Oh for crying out loud, what the hell are you doing? This isn't time to sleep! Do you want to finish this mission or not?"

Inasuke had no patience left to spare for his partner, and so the disguised agents started brawling right in front of dumbfounded Pusheen, her father and her uncanonical siblings. In the middle of their scuffle, Urato's paw accidentally touched and tore apart something in mid-air. It was a plot hole, it turned out; inside the newly opened crack were no one other than Stormy and Pip, the characters the fic replaced. Being his ever hyperactive self, Pip immediately sprinted all around the room, knocking everyone over including possessed Pusheen and the uncanonical "siblings". The uncanonical siblings, being really Pusheen's clones drawn in a single one-off GIF, poofed out of existence, while the badfic-wraith began to rise out of Pusheen's body.

At this, Inasuke's eyes nearly lit up. "Look, here's our chance!" he cried and grabbed the nearest GIF file. The fic's gratuitous use of official images did have a use after all. "How does it go again? Oh, right, in the name of Claire Belton, er… go away!"

He then threw the GIF, which went right through the wraith. The foggy mass dissolved into nothing, the badfic influence was gone.

One neuralyzing of all canon characters present later, the agents returned to their RCs at last, stripped of their animal disguises.

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Out of the frying pan, into the fire. The mission into a pastel hellhole was thankfully over as quickly as it started, but Urato had to put up with his partner's cooing and squeeing over his new picture book again. He put on earbuds as quickly as possible, drowning out the noise with powerful electric guitar music, while reaching for the nearest set of hand weights.

But before he could immerse himself in his heaven, his partner tottered over to him, still holding his mini Booky.

"Huh? Whaddya want?" Urato shouted above the loud music in his ears.

Unlike his expectation, Inasuke wasn't irritated. Instead, he smiled sweetly and told him, "You did good for your first mission, Ura-chan."

Urato was taken aback for a second. Lacking an appropriate answer, he just grumbled, "Lil' shit."

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Minis (all up for adoption):

Mini-These Things (Pusheen the Cat):

• Pusheens

Mini-Ritzy Bitz (Neko Atsume):

• Neko Autisumi