can someone explain to me how skirk works?

decided to start prefarming her shit a week or two ago because "why not", got ascension mats and "good enough" artifacts, pulled her earlier tonight, slapped this on her, kinda read the trial tutorial so far as I've internalized that "her E causes some kind of cryo infused attack state that you wanna use mostly, and that you can click Q during her E being active to do... something" What does her Q even do when the E isn't active? I know something about she generates her own stacks vs using energy.

anyways, I just gave her a shot in abyss 3/2/2'd 12-3 (first half some mavika/xilo/xq/cit comp [normally furina'd be where xq is but needed furina for skirk's maiden voyage, it destroyed everything pretty fast, second half skirk/yelan/furi/escoff, which more or less worked, but not incredible as there was obviously shit I had to learn about how skirk works (e.g. rotations n shiet, can't pop her E and go to someone else to pop their shit and come back because then it's on cooldown etc...), but surprisingly well at times, and pretty poorly at others with my button mashing and operating under the rotation format of 'if it's recharged or off cooldown use it')

and frankly, I'm pretty fucking surprised how "well" this worked given the half assed gearing and severe lack of understanding in how the character itself or the rotation with it works

so how does skirk work? tl;dr that shit for me, I get the E is basically cryo raiden Q but without the screenshot unsheathe damage, and Q does... different shit during E-state being active, or not; and how does rotation and all that work with skirk and her own E and Q etc...?