Krieger and Rye - how to make them work?

Forged in the Dark Scum & Villainy
1

So, generally, I like S&V quite a bit, but there are a few character bits that stick out as… odd.

Like, how to use Krieger and Rye as contacts.

Krieger is a fine blaster pistol. I have a hard time wrapping my brain around the idea of an item being a friend or enemy. Shouldn’t the focus of the relationship be with the bearer of the weapon? (Unless there’s an AI in that blaster pistol… but even then the fiction seems a little off.)

Rye is an unrequited love. That’s a solid choice for a friend or a rival… but having an unrequited love be just a baseline contact also feels a little off as far as the fiction goes.

So how have y’all handled these?

UPDATE/EDIT: I think I get it, after a quick re-read, but please correct me if I’m reading this wrong. Unmarked contacts are friends and allies, but not particularly close, right? So Krieger-as-close-friend is a treasured weapon. And this close friend relationship might manifest in interesting ways beyond just using it to intimidate people during downtime.

Rye being “neutral” means they’re still a big part of the character’s life, but appropriately from afar.

Is that right?

2

Yes, contacts that do not have the filled in downward or upward arrow are just friends/family/people in the characters orbit, but won’t necessarily go out of their way to help or hinder the character and crew.

Krieger was used in my game as a sort of housing for an assistant virtual intelligence. The character had a wealthy background, and the gun had been part of the autonomous network that ran their house, so it was basically their butler who would point out interesting details or translate alien languages for them.

Rye was still an unrequited love, but the unrequited love was for the player, and Rye was the ship’s doctor (we agreed ahead of time that we wanted a ship that had a larger crew, so we elected some of the ship and character contacts as members of that crew). So that created a lot of interesting and charge conversations as the game progressed.