SOLUTION: PLANET OF BUBBLESANSWER: CHAI
The answers to the crossword-style clues are as follows:
Googling enough of these words together reveals that these are all words in the names of Olipop soda flavors. This puzzle being themed around Olipop is hinted at by "Ensign Ollie's discarded pop cans" in the flavortext, and the images in the lower tables can be reverse image-searched to confirm this. The flavors are:
Column 1: GINGER ALE, LEMON LIME, GINGER LEMON
Column 2: TROPICAL PUNCH, ORANGE SQUEEZE, APPLE CRISP
Column 3: CHERRY COLA, VINTAGE COLA, RIDGE RUSH
Column 4: CHERRY VANILLA
Each image in those lower tables depicts a flavor whose name is made up of two of the clued words. As heavily hinted in the flavortext, the next step is to connect pairs of dots corresponding to flavors. Note that some flavors share words, such as Cherry Vanilla and Cherry Cola. Connecting those dots reveals, for each column of flavors, a letter drawn out by the lines:
In order by column, those letters spell out this puzzle's answer, CHAI.
I don't remember the order that I wrote these puzzles in, but this was the first puzzle of the hunt to be made into a webpage. I wanted to use this as the first puzzle since it included several tables that required different formatting. Somehow, there are no available images of the isolated Olipop flavor artwork, so I had to use the can images from their website and edit the text out (very tedious, given the lighting gradient; very proud of that editing job).