The flavour text suggests that the feeder answers are from puzzles that have seemingly unexplained hyphens in their flavour texts. It turns out that each clue in this puzzle starts with a word which was thusly hyphenated in an earlier puzzle. Substituting these puzzles’ solutions, solving the remaining clues, and applying the operations identified by − (minus, meaning taking away letters) and ∩ (intersection, meaning leave only letters both words have in common) yields:
| Clue | Solution | Result | Indexes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Design (Pigment of Your Imagination) | SUPERMAN | ||
| − Types of corny/dad jokes | − PUNS | ||
| − Opposite of Ms. | − MR | EA | 3, 8 |
| Groups (Rule of Five) | JEOPARDY | ||
| ∩ Expanse [...], or to extend a limb out | ∩ STRETCH | ER | 4, 7 |
| Parts (It Takes Two) | TETRIS | ||
| − Religious ceremony | − RITE | TS | 2, 1 |
| Small (Number Place) | CAGE | ||
| ∩ Quintessence | ∩ CORE | CE | 6, 10 |
| Wraught (Don’t Take it That Way) | LITERALLY | ||
| − Sick | − ILL | ||
| − 12 months | − YEAR | LT | 5, 9 |
Putting the letters in the order specified by the indexes, the solution is
STEEL CRATE