Timers and Status Durations

Hello forum.

I recently got into ff6 romhacking (and romhacking in general!) and I've been doing some research the last few days, digging around documentation, searching the forums, and the like. At the moment I don't have a concrete idea of what I want to create, so I've been mostly fiddling around to see what is possible and is not. Here are a few questions I've run into while messing around. I would be grateful if you could humor me and answer some of these possibly odd inquiries.

1. Timers - Is it possible to customize/implement these timers elsewhere?
I found some of the locations where the game uses timers (such as the falling house in Tzen, the Opera House event, etc), but wasn't sure how to exactly implement them or make use of these numbers.

A very simple/hypothetical example of something I'd try out would be like:
When walking into the town of Albrook, the timer starts. If the timer runs out, it's game over -- if the player exits Albrook before the timer ends, the timer resets and can continue safely.

If this is at all possible, would I have to replace data accordingly or would it be possible to call an existing timer with the same conditions for this situation?

2. Status Durations - Is there a way to alter the duration of these effects?
Status effects like Stop and Sleep wear off after a certain amount of time. I was wondering if these values could be changed at all. For example, making the Stop duration wear off much quicker or make Sleep last much longer. If individual spells aren't possible, are they possible to effect as a whole/group?

And a little bonus question:
Is it possible to reset already-opened chests in a playthrough/save file via the editor or hex editing?

I hope I was clear enough and not too wordy.
Much thanks!