Uh, so... [He's bad at explaining and he feels like she's a teacher who's just waiting to give him a bad grade. This was a terrible idea. Nonetheless, he tries to pull together an explanation.]

The short explanation is that this planet is dying, and we've been brought here because we produce Chroma, which is like an energy source here? And we can get it just through touching. And, uh... Every month when the moons change, it can affect us in different ways, so we could wind up looking like the rat guy we saw before. Or a different animal, I dunno-- it's different for everyone.

So if we want to stand a chance of finding a way home, we need to make as much Chroma as we can to help fix things.

[Does that make sense? He hopes so, maybe it's just drunken rambling.]