instead of hard coding the health/damage directly into the player, i instead decided to learn about components in Godot, make a separate component for handling health/damage, and attached said component to the player.
my next hurdles are to figure out how to set the current health to the max health (in this case, 13 / 13), be able to modify the current health from there (e.g. -5 HP should equal 7 / 13). in the case of the former, i *think* i know why the current health is defaulting to 0, and that's as simple as changing one variable, but i'll test it later. i'm calling it a day for now.