Mike Wilks is the author of The Ultimate Alphabet, a book where 26 illustrations depict things starting with each of the 26 letters. The image here shows six fragments from that book:
R: When I zoom, I can see runes, perhaps written on ruins.
E: The fish are eels and the elements with atomic numbers 63 and 68 are europium and erbium.
F: A man with a fez and the Roman numbers fourteen and fifteen.
U: The flags of Uganda, the UK and the USSR are prominent and the thing in the front is an urn.
N: I can't make out any of the things in the depicted fragment, but a web search tells me that the hand is Neptune's, who wears a necktie. There are also some nude or naked, er, Nigerians perhaps in the full picture.
D: That's a Dalmatian dog. The wiki article explicitly names this as an example for an object that has several appropriate words associated with it.
We get the word REFUND.
I've followed the advice z100 had given me in comments and plugged the image into this online tool for Fourier transformation on images. Clearly, there is a word here and after adjusting the contrast, I got this:
That looks like SPUNKY to me.
This looks like a variation on the NATO phonetic alphabet and the hint confirms it.
Pakistan: India, since both are countries in South Asia. (It could also be either Hotel or Juliett, because, like Pakistan, they are next to India.)
Dance: Foxtrot and Tango are the dances in the Nato alphabet.
Omega: Alfa and Omega, the beginning and the end. (But Delta is another Greek letter in the NATO alphabet.)
Beans: Lima beans are a thing. (A Kilo of beans is also a thing when cooking for a hungry family.)
Cricket: Golf, because it's also a sport? Or India again, because they are good at it?
Lightswitch: Charlie Puth wrote a song called Light Switch. The things you learn on PSE.
Choose wisely and you get ITALIC .
That's Shakespeare's Sonnet 54, whose first line is:
O how much more doth beauty beauteous seem
The version here has all M's replaced with AUT and vice versa. AUT = M, or in other words (well, just one word): AUTISM. Very neat.
There are a lot of arrows here, each depicting a possible move of one of six pieces on a chessboard. The picture might be clearer when these six pieces are separated:
At least two of the pieces are unorthodox or fairy chess pieces, the Zebra Z and the Elephant E. (I first used another name for that piece, Alfil, but Ankoganit pointed out this better choice in a comment.)
Taking the zero for the castling notation 0-0 or 0-0-0 as the letter O, the letters can be anagrammed to BRONZE.
Let's fill in the answers:
The overall answer is found by taking two adjacent letters of each word, each time staring one more place to the right, thereby forming the "stairs" mentioned in the hint: REPUTATION.
I didn't see that answer until Ankoganit pointed out the solution of the chess puzzle and how to read the answer in the final grid. Thanks!
