Sadly, I apologize. I did not quite accurately record the code the way my program was completely in my original post. There was actually a "wait(1)" in my first while loop. I ended up fixing it so that the scorpion initiates the "stand" animation by setting its health over 0 in the "main" file. Because I never set it over 0 in the main file, scrpn_health kept equaling 0, and never initiating the "while (my.status != scorpion_dead)" code, since my.status was equal to scorpion_dead.