(Rejoining the class with Maru's permission! +500 words)
You're only going to get one more shot. Hop to it.
Barth had meant to pay attention and run multiple times across a field filled with Halloween resident-eating plants. Really, he had. He had been prepared for Gym to be full of life-threatening situations. Why not? Everything else in this school was dangerous, and anything promising physical activity especially so. The rest of the students (well, most of them) had certainly seen no problem with charging across the field in laborious, uncalculated zigzags. The ones that paid attention, anyway. The ones that hadn't charged ahead a few short steps before disappearing in a tangle of flailing limbs down the throat of things with a lot of teeth and a lot of fins.
So really, he had meant to.
The problem was that the ground quality here was nearly the same as the piece of land next to Breck's shed. When he'd first arrived at Amityville, Barth had started the long process of testing various places on campus for their nappability. He'd learned very quickly that Breck's shed, and subsequently the outskirts of the Forbidden Forest, easily contained the loamiest and most comfortable soil on campus. When he had rested only for a moment in the grass, it had trapped him more thoroughly than any groundshark. And much more pleasantly. That was the way of things. More flies with honey, etc.
But it made tasks like Gym problematic.
Barth reflected that the other problem might just be that he was not good at Gym. He'd done surprisingly well in his other classes, but then, he'd been careful to not choose ones too outside his comfort zone. Classes that were stocked with inane tasks and certainly involved nothing like a Field Day. Gym, he thought with a great deal of gloominess, was just not something Sloth demons were equipped for.
But he had to do it.
Even if he had technically spent the entirety of the class half-watching everyone else get swallowed by sharks. Some flowers were late bloomers. Some horses broke late. And sloth demons, the good ones, were late about everything.
Or they didn't do it at all, came a nagging inclination. Not the case here, he promised himself, peeling himself from the ground. He would just...just err, follow the established path that had already been measured out. About 15 steps of it, anyway. The last two, or three, or four, depending on how Red had decided to complicate things, he'd have to figure out on his own.
That wasn't a bad amount of guesswork, all things considered.
The footwork leading up to it was another story. Barth very heavily navigated away from his comfortable spot in the grass, looking across the long field. In some respects, waiting until the very last round was probably all he was physically capable of in the first place. The idea of doing Indian Sprints left a certain unsteadiness in his limbs. But this wasn't Indian Sprints. One round, Red had said. Only one round. He stepped, very slowly and steadily, out onto the grass.
Profile: Toshi
