Helium Cupacity

Answer:

ELEMENT OF SUPRISE

You can start by answering the questions. The underlined parts of the questions are most relevant, since they are definitions for the answers. For example, an "ancient Egyptian scroll" is PAPYRUS.

As you build up your answers, you might start to notice that they all have one thing in common: they all contain an "up" sound. To answer the strangely phrased questions, you need to change the spellings of the answers to contain the word "up." For example, SCALLOP (ska·luhp) should be modified to SCALLUP. You might notice that "up" is also contained in every question -- this is to hint that every answer should do the same. Indeed, the title (Helium Cupacity) also follows this rule. The answers and their "Up"-ified spellings are given below.

Question						Answer		"Up"-ified
What do you call the saltwater clam you gobbled up? (7)						SCALLOP		Sc Al Lu P
What do you call the develupment of sporophyte directly from gametophytic tissue without fusion of gametes? (7)						APOGAMY		U P Og Am Y
What do you call the uppermost trees or branches that conceal the forest floor? (6)						CANOPY		Ca N U P Y
What do you call an international group made up of people all over the world? (12)						COSMOPOLITAN		Co Sm U Po Li Ta N
What do you call it when you mix up fat or oil into soap by reaction with an alkali? (8)						SAPONIFY		S U Po Ni F Y
What do you call the ancient Egyptian scroll you dug up? (7)						PAPYRUS		Pu P Y Ru S
What do you call it when you're feeling fickle and your mood changes up suddenly? (10)						CAPRICIOUS		Cu Pr I C I O U S
What do you call it when deadlines come up? (8)						APPROACH		U P Pr O Ac H
What do you call the headmaster that checks up on you? (9)						PRINCIPAL		Pr I N Cu P Al
What do you call it when you finally clear up your feelings and pop the question? (7)						PROPOSE		P Ru Po Se

Once you have the "Up"-ified answers, you'll need to place the letters into the balloons. As clued by "chemistry" in the flavor text, every balloon contains a chemical element from the periodic table. Each answer can be uniquely placed into one of the balloon rows with this constraint. (Note that if you did not "Up"-ify your answers, some of the answers cannot be spelled with elements.)

To help with confirmation, each balloon is color-coded according to a specific element group. For example, yellow balloons only contain reactive nonmetals while neon green balloons hold actinides.

After filling in the balloons, you may notice that there is exactly one glowing balloon in each row. Taking these letters from top to bottom spells Al Am N Ta F S U Pr I Se.

If you take some care in sounding this out, you'll find that it sounds like ELEMENT OF SUPRISE, which is the (up-ified) answer to this puzzle.

Author's Notes

This one was pretty fun to make. From the start, we wanted to make an element-based puzzle, and given that balloons are thematic in Up and can be filled with various gases, this seemed like a natural fit.

At first, we tried to build Up-themed words using elements (like PaRaDySe and BOYSCoUTs), but it was hard to come up with a common thread or coherent theme to tie it all up.

We got the idea of using the word "up" itself when we realized the huge amount of phrases with "up" in them (e.g. stand up, seven up, grown up, uproot, upset). This evolved into looking for words that contained "up" (puppy, erupt, couple), and then finally words that didn't technically have "up" in them, but sounded like they did! (Shout out to "octopus," the first such word we thought up.)

This ended up working pretty well, as the candidate pool is large. "Element of Surprise" seemed like an excellent answer given our element-themed mechanic and the fact that "surprise" can be pronounced with an "up" sound.

One caveat of this is that it's ironically very difficult to spell "element" using the elements (there are no E, El, Em, or M elements). We ended up going for "Al" and "Am" which still fit the theme of sounding out words.

Unfortunately, we couldn't find any good "up" words with "Am" in their chemical spellings, so we had to settle for apogamy, which was really awkward to clue. We ultimately opted to give the clue as straight as possible to make it easier to Google. Hippopotamus almost worked, but not quite!