LOL so once again, stepping away for a minute was helpful. Keep that in mind, Stencylers!
The reason it wasn't working properly was because this logic was all part of a collision.
Now, I have the collision set the color effect, and OnFire to true. Then I have a "Do every" event that only counts every second If "OnFire", then an Always/Updating for "OnFire?" to check the decrement every second.
It was doing doubles for an odd reason, that I'm not sure... probably because it was two collisions, but the problem is that I was trying to control the doubles with a boolean, as is standard... still did weird double count down.
However, it was never going to remove the effect unless it was collided and firecount was 0... which would never happen.