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What Quoth said, but...
Plagiarism and copyright violation is grey and fuzzy enough that only going to court and fighting it out will really determine whether you've gone too far.
Short works can be more at risk than longer, because little pieces of short works can be seen as a more significant proportion. Witness some of the bitter struggles over music riffs and the like.
And, of course, there will be the reputational risk of being thought to have copied too much even when not strictly plagiarism.
Offsetting all of the above is that unless you become very famous, the chances of being held to account for anything except the most blatant plagiarism is pretty close to zero (not least because unless you're famous you won't have enough money to cover the legal costs of suing you).
Given that there seems no convincing legal reason to avoid what you have been planning, I think it comes down how you feel about it. I'd use the old golden-rule thing: how would you feel if the roles were reversed? It's always hard to made that call with sufficient distance, and you can never know how someone else might react, but feeling comfortable about such decisions within yourself is important (or it is to me).
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