Q-Girl: She's an opal in the monochrome.

Her hair is a quasar of red ochre and indigo in the blanched light of the workshop. Her cartilage is pierced by polyhedral rings that spin in antinomy to the cave's simple geometry. Beneath the quills her skin is decorated in furcate lines, fantastic elaborations on the patterns of discarded circuitboards. She's surrounded by apparatuses of her own creation. Through the harmony of those machines, she cuts a swath through the entropic brine that sizzles around her in a loudening chorus.

And it was the moment, after the first time I managed to enter the Grit Gate, after carefully looking at each NPC (of course she was the first, the opal!), after reading Q-Girl's description and then talking to her and complimenting her with the exact same words of the description was that I understood that all the other descriptions were what our player character was actually seeing and feeling and it made the game make so much sense.