Ordinals and Inscriptions on Bitcoin

There's an old client that sits atop a Bitcoin node. Do they always have to be connected? Can you run it independently? So if you can give us like, how do ordinals and inscriptions work? And how do these kind of like clients on top of Bitcoin work at a high level? That'd be amazing. Yep. I'll probably get a little technical just because I think you can take it. It'll be a little bit different than all the other kind of like higher level explanations.