Barrels O' Fun, it sounds like Lat wants to change which emeralds the player has, not just get information about them. I don't know if that's possible without having the player collect an emerald object, since there doesn't seem to be a Lua function for it, but maybe there's a way. As for stopping the timer, you could just subtract 1 from the global leveltime variable every tic, but that wouldn't work if leveltime turns out to be read-only as well, and even if it did work, it would screw up a bunch of hardcoded effects that depend on leveltime continuously increasing (for example, super characters wouldn't lose rings while the timer was stopped).