Solution

The first thing to notice — and which many of you did very early on — was that each Raddle's ending word can be associated with a number from 1 to 21. Given a such a sequence, the natural thing is to put them in order, like so:

Which the titles in order, we can now consider the first words. In this new order, the first letters of the first words spell a message: THIRD WORDS THIRD LETTER. This is an instruction to find the third letter of the third words in each Raddle. In the original, published order, these words are:

The third letters of the third words spell the message IT'S ELEMENT NUMBER THREE. Which is one final clue phrase to get us to the answer: LITHIUM.

Our randomly chosen winner is…

Casey Callaghan

Solvers

Congrats to all 328 of you who got it right!

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