The muscle growth cross-over story... (Patreon)

This might ramble a bit, but here are my thoughts.

While working on Jeremy's Journal and Shrimp of the House #8, I'm brainstorming ideas for bringing a number of characters together.

The end of Friends Forever set up a few basic ideas.  The premise for the cross-over is that we find out Elliot still has a bottle of the magic ink.  Corey from Li'l Bro, Brody from My Twin No More, and Tyler from Transforming Tyler all hear about it and enter into negotiations to get it for people in their lives - They don't want it for themselves, they want it for loved ones.

One possibility I'm strongly considering is to model it after Marvel's cross-over events.  This would involve 5 separate miniseries - 1 detailing the basic story involving all four main characters, and 4 separate miniseries telling side stories for each of the four within that main story.

If this is how I go, I plan to do a thread where Corey from Li'l Bro helps Elliot and Rusty adjust to their new lives and gets them involved in his gym.  Another thread would have Elliot's eye drawn to girl in the area, but he's too shy to approach her.

Corey's story would revolve around wanting to get the ink to make his brother Francis a little bigger.  Francis will have a misconception about how big the one bottle will make him, and flat out refuses the idea, but Corey bargains in secret, knowing his brother is dying to be just a little bit bigger.

Brody's story finds him a member of Francis' gym.  He's unable to reconcile everything he learned at the end of MTNM and put any kind of closure on it because he's stuck on the idea that he and he and Russ don't look like twins any more.  He blames himself for wanting his muscle/size too badly, and feels the ink would fix that and allow him to heal on the other issues.

So far, I don't have too much for Tyler's story.  Generally speaking, he'll want Gabe to be bigger.  While Gabe likes their size disparity, Tyler isn't too crazy about it, but neither of them want him to use their formula - neither of them want Tyler to sacrifice the size Gabe gave him in the first place.   Tyler will see Elliot's ink as a way for them both to have what they want.

The biggest hang-up I have is that since I release my stories in their entirety, the ending will be spoiled as soon as one of the minis is finished.  I'm leaning towards releasing the whole thing as one giant volume, but the root problem will still remain.  It's possible I can end each of the character stories without reveling who gets the ink until the end of the central mini.  Then the main story gets placed last.

Another worry is that as envisioned, there isn't any growth/muscle growth going on within the story.  It's a story about a bunch of guys who are already big from the start.  Does that kind of story work for people in this genre?  One thing I'm thinking of is to write fantasy sequences where the big characters imagine the growth of their smaller companions.

I don't know, but those are my thoughts as of now.  What does everybody think?  Care to chime in?