Over the course of the following month, you spent a lot of time around the researcher, whose full name you eventually learned to be Suzy Jones. Despite her casual demeanor, she seemed to really know her stuff when it came to science, and it wasn't long before she was studying samples from you under a microscope. In a surreal twist, it seemed that the square she had cut out of you still retained your full consciousness just the same as the rest of your body. The senses coming from both parts mixed freely in the back of your mind in a weird haze, but with a little practice you were able to hone in on a single perspective at a time, making it much easier to process. This ability soon came in handy when it became time for "field testing", which Suzy saw fit to conduct herself. You had been looking around as the sample square when suddenly she had grabbed a clipboard in one hand, and brought you around to the back of her pants with the other, dropping you inside. Unfortunately for you, however, you couldn't block out the sensations completely. The smell of the woman's poorly washed buttcrack, as well as her subsequent gas, leaked faintly into your mind as a sort of mental aftertaste, despite your best efforts to ignore them.

Little did you know at the time, that short burst of gas would be nothing compared to what you were about to go through. Though not able to figure out your molecular properties just yet, Suzy felt close to a breakthrough, and proceeded to greenlight a batch of test products. After some collaboration from the whole company, as well as some input from Kierra herself, it was decided that the special properties of your fabric would be used to create a new kind of adjustable underwear, one that could change from briefs to a thong and back again on "command". To facilitate this miraculous process, each pair of panties would have a patch of shrinking cotton along the back, positioned across from the wearer's anus to catch any farts released. Whenever the user desired, all they had to do was release a fart, and the shrinking cotton would then contract to pull the rest of the panties into the wearer's ideal fit. They'd have to convince potential buyers to be more conscious of how they controlled their gas, but as the marketing team put it, "Women don't fart in public anyway, right? We'll just have to play off of that."

To develop the first test batch, since Suzy hadn't yet figured out how to synthesize your material, she opted to just cut you up further, separating you into twelve distinct squares. If you had thought juggling between two perspectives was bad before, this was an absolute nightmare. It was all you could do to keep your mind in one place at a time, but as the prototype panties were finished one by one, you would soon realize that it didn't really matter which one you chose, anyways.

After completion, the twelve pairs of panties were distributed among the office for further field tests, with one being given to Kierra as well, to thank her for her contribution. During the times you weren't being worn, you were able to figure out that the receptionist, that intern, and the researcher had all gotten a pair, though the researcher mainly kept hers in the lab to continue studying it. The other eight pairs all belonged to women at various levels of the corporate hierarchy, and you became intimately familiar with the smell and taste of all their asses as they wore you regularly. It seemed like no matter where your consciousness turned, there was a different disgusting butt waiting for it. You tried to spend as much time as you could in panties that weren't being worn, at least, but with twelve different sources of butt funk floating in the back of your mind, finding peace was truly impossible. Not to mention, each of the women had been actively encouraged to fart on you until they got their desired fit, and to keep doing it to maintain your shape, so you were subjected to an unimaginable amount of gas between the twelve of them.

This was all far too much for you to bear. Your mind was not broken, but your spirit certainly had been. If only you had never met Layla or her stupid mom, maybe none of these ridiculous circumstances would have come about. But here you found yourself, personal living panties for a dozen different women at once. You tried to find some positives to this indescribable situation, but you found you could never fully adjust. As the beta test drew to a close, this turned out to not matter anyway, as Suzy finally had a breakthrough with the data she'd collected.

"Brilliant!" you heard her say one day. You adjusted your focus to her panties so you could hear her more clearly. "I've finally figured out the secret of what makes this stuff work! It's all got to do with this peculiar bond structure!" You wanted to scream up at her, "No, the secret is me!! I'm alive, damnit!!" ...But of course you had no way to prove it to her. You watched helplessly, an idle passenger as she developed a method for duplicating your atoms to create new batches of fabric. This was Suzy's holy grail, the last missing piece before mass production of shrinking cotton panties could properly begin.

Later listening from under the skirt of a marketing executive, you overheard their new name for the product made out of you: "Ripettes". A full scale advertising campaign was drawn up, and thousands of new pairs of panties were created using your fabric to meet their anticipated demand. FuturoChic knew they were working with something big, and they intended to ride their fashion movement all the way to the bank. This was all well and good for them, you thought, but as the first few batches of Ripettes rolled off the factory line, you realized to your complete and utter horror that the duplication process had copied your consciousness too. FuturoChic was prepared to ship out thousands upon thousands of these things, and in your mind you could see, smell, and taste out of every. Single. One.

-----

In the end, perhaps your only stroke of good luck had been the lukewarm success of your product line. Ripettes had sold decently at first, but they never really became more than a fad, and only a few hundred thousand of you were made. Many of you sat unsold in boxes in the back of department stores, but the women who did buy you certainly got a lot of use out of you. Though twelve women had been a lot to handle to begin with, things only got worse as time went on. Eventually so many people were wearing you at once, that at least three people were actively farting on you at any given time. You could push it to the back of your mind, but you no longer ever got a break from the smell of women's farts, it was simply a constant background to your life. Even after years of being a product line, things never really seemed to improve. Every fart continued to smell just as bad as Layla's first few had all the way back at the beginning of your bizarre journey, though it went without saying that some were much worse than others. Many women neglected to wipe properly, and so you found the taste of old shit and buttsweat on your tongue at all times as well. The combined taste of all of it at once completely overloaded your subconscious, and your waking moments became an eternal, unending barrage of oblivious women torturing you with their asses. At such a scale, it practically felt like you had been transported to an alternate dimension, one full of nothing but sweat, shit, and farts.

Eventually though, you did find an upside. Being a whole network of panties for half a million women, you could always sort through the noise to find someone having an interesting conversation or doing something entertaining. You learned to embrace the voyeurism of it all, and quite enjoyed being able to tag along for a little fun whenever one of your owners helped herself to a little "private time" while she had you on. It seemed a pitifully small reward for being the buttfloss of an entire nation of women, but at least it was something.

---

Somewhere familiar, Kierra and Layla were enjoying another movie night together. As they sat and watched, both women periodically let loose into their panties to make sure they stayed on right. Though they were both contributing to the endless cloud of stink in your mind, it barely registered to you, a small fraction of an ocean of sensory overload. From her comfortable perch on her same old couch, Kierra let herself get a little too relaxed, and her next fart came out far wetter than she had intended. She fidgeted in her seat, unsure of what to do, when Layla turned around to address her, clearly lost in thought about something else. "Hey," she said to her mom, "do you remember that guy I used to hang out with in high school, Gabe? Wonder what he's up to these days?"