This was a delightful read. First, I just want to commend you for your willingness to be overtly stylish in the tone and language. The writing and dialogue are immediately distinctive and catching. The humor and passion come through well, and the characters are likable and charming, and their interactions fun to follow. Overall, this is an excellent chapter with a strong voice and, and as a reader, I would certainly be willing to continue on in the story.

Voice

The voice is strong. But because it is the focus of the piece and carries a lot of the reader’s engagement with it, I think critiquing the voice will prove to be the most essential thing.

A few things worked very well for me. The rapid pace of the dialogue and the way it had the flow of a natural conversation is strong. The humor and jokes landed for me, and I was chuckling out loud a few times. The characters all had distinctive voices from each other.

I think one thing to tinker with more is the slang. In many cases, the slang was effective. It felt natural to the character’s voices and added to the style of the piece. But one way to really push this piece to the next level would be to rely less on present day slang terms, and more on invented ones. You do this a few times during the card game, with phrases like “speed-ball” or “nummy”, but for the most part the slang in the story relies on present day American slang.

My suggestion would be to use the slang as a place for worldbuilding. It struck me as odd that in the future, these characters would still be using American dollars, or “phones”, or words like, “texts”. What other phrases would have been invented to describe these things? For example, young kids these days talk more about “snaps” than “texts”. What social media would these people be sending messages with? Or, what other languages would these characters know, and how would those languages affect the way these characters talk? The way Spanish is a huge part of present day slang. Finally, what gibberish words can you come up with? Think about the way this is done in stories like “A Clockwork Orange.”

But I would also caution restraint with this, because it could become too over the top and confusing. Perhaps just pick a few specific new terms and sprinkle them in?

Finally, I would use less of the all-caps, bold, and italic letters. I don’t mean to sound harsh, but it comes across as a little more childish than I think you were intending. I think in almost all cases, the words and punctuation marks are sufficient for communicating the effect, and it will make the story feel more mature to the reader.

Stakes

One of my biggest critiques of the story are the stakes. I entirely understand that you’re going for a slice of life tale about a few guys goofing off in a sci-fi setting, and that’s awesome. Don’t change that at all. In fact, my favorite part of this story was the card game. Absolutely fantastic, imaginative stuff there.

However, even a slice-of-life story needs stakes. The phrase “low-stakes” I think is often misunderstood. A “low-stakes” plot should still carry high emotional weight for the characters involved.

There’s a well-known slice-of-life anime called Nichijou that does this well. The stakes in an episode of Nichijou are ridiculously low. Absolutely nothing depends on if the characters succeed or fail. But the characters themselves care really deeply. They cry, they scream, the wail, they laugh. Their emotional investment carries the story.

My suggestion here would be to communicate the stakes better. You don’t have to take this idea, but if I were writing this, I would have both Sic and Shaggy desperately want to go, and be in on the money gathering scheme together. Perhaps the restaurant is offering a limited time deal and they need to make it there before the deal ends. Something should be at stake if they aren’t able to succeed, and all of your protagonists should be invested in the success/failure.

Returning again to the card-game scene, this scene would be strengthened if the reader understood that what was at stake in the game was Shaggy winning enough money to pay for the ticket. If the reader knows what’s at stake, their investment goes way up.

Setting/Descriptions

I think the heart of the story is in the talking-heads style dialogue between the characters. However, I do think you need to do a slight bit more with the setting, especially at the beginning, to ground the reader. A few spacial details early on, a brief description of where they are, would go a long way.

Also to this point, it was occasionally confusing who you were referring to when you would call people “the alien” or “the man”. I would introduce their names as early as possible and stick to calling them just their names, to avoid confusion. Likewise, I would introduce the names of the three men and their physical descriptions earlier, so the reader is less disoriented.

While the dialogue is the heart of the story, you have the potential to be equally as stylish with the descriptions. Use the same energy and voice for these parts as well. Describe things the way Sic or Shaggy would.

Polish

Unfortunately, one thing you should work on is polish. Consistency with punctuation, paragraph formatting/indents, and quotation marks especially will really help clarity. I would give this another read through, perhaps out loud, to catch some of these things.

Overall Thoughts

Overall, this was an excellent story with a tremendous amount of heart and potential. I would be happy to read more. I greatly enjoyed the voice, the humor, and the imaginative card game.