When you tried to match up your dropquote letters and grids, you discovered that each set of letters had one column too many. Despite this, working from either the left or right you could match up the black squares and letter groups and determine which column was superfluous.

After that, the dropquotes could be solved normally. Each dropquote resolved to a series of clues or questions whose answers were numbers.

The big grid was used for a Paint by Numbers/Nonograms puzzle, with the across clues being the answers to the clues in the dropquote solutions [ORDERED SOMEHOW - I THINK THEY GOT AN EXTRA LETTER OR TWO SOMEWHERE? - GET GABBY TO SUPPLY HOW THIS WORKED], and the down clues being the alphabetic positions of the letters in the extra column, with the position of that column used to position them.

The Paint By Numbers worked out to a picture of ??? and ??? and the instruction at the top suggested to combine the descriptions of these pictures and, I think take a letter bank to get VENTRILOQUISM [CONFIRM].

[IF POSSIBLE, GET ALL THE DROPQUOTE ANSWERS, PBN CLUES, AND THE COMPLETED PBN SOLUTION FROM GABBY AND PUT THEM ALL HERE.]