There are times to show and times to tell. Long periods of monotonous dialogue is an example of a time when it's best to summarise the conversation and move on. Overall, this story was just way too much dialogue and not enough plot, so the more idle chatter you can pare away, the better. More importantly, *actions.* I cannot dream of why you would use that formatting in what is meant to be serious prose. It's not even acceptable when you're talking on TF2chan [read the rules] let alone writing a story. Use descriptions! Make sentences! Reducing the most pivotal action in the story to a single word between asterisks is just so unbelievably lazy, I just--Christ, Lass, why?!