"The Telepathic Twins"
(working title)
The premise of The Telepathic Twins.
I originally called them The Psychic Twins, but then I realized that they are not technically psychic. They are telepathic.
Inspired by the twins in the 1970 movie, The Nude Vampire. (Catherine & Marie-Pierre Castel)
The basic premise allows this to go a variety of directions. You could go comic book, horror, action, and even erotic (with some obvious changes).
Here's the idea, so far. A loving couple has twin girls. They don't realize until later that the girls are telepathic.
The girls can hear and see the thoughts of those around them. They can receive not only mental dialogue, but also visual images in a person's mind. They can see what you are looking at, but also they see your memories when you remember something visually.
They cannot willingly turn off this ability, but, for instance, if they are surrounded by people they can "drown out" the choas by focus on something. The only time this ability does seem to turn off is when they are asleep.
Not really a new idea, right? Well, I've never really seen anyone explore what should be an obvious benefit of this ability. When they see your memory and thought, they are gaining your knowledge and experience.
This is not to say that they will retain everything, as if they had photographic memory, but they are effectively gaining "first-hand" experience of things.
The point is that these are intelligent girls. These girls do not dislike their ability, like so many movies portray telepaths. They don't try to block everyone out so they can have silence all the time. For the most part, they want this data input. They want to learn things.
In spite of being well-adjusted to their condition, they could not go to regular schools. Not only would they be technically constantly cheating, they're already much smarter than children their own age. And then there are the people who are just plain afraid of them.
They and their parents were always moving from town to town, but one day, while between homes, let's say, they had a car accident, and the parents died. The girls were about age 8, and they survived. They left the vehicle and the corpses, taking everything that would have indicated that there was more than the two adults in the car when it crashed. They were smart enough to know that they're lives would be better if they remained unconnected to this.
Why, you might ask? They want to retain control over who was in the position of their "guardian". You have to understand that these children are as clever and mentally mature as an adult. For the sake of appearences, they need to attach themselves to someone, but since they will be constantly getting that person's thoughts, they want to choose the person, themselves.
They live semi-symbiotically (sympsychotically?) with their "host". Their "host" is a sort of anchor for them, and without this anchor, they will slowly withdraw into themselves or attach to someone undesirable out of desperation. A lack of anchor would not become a real problem until after maybe a month.
When the "host" is someone that fits well with them, which is rare, then they can live basically trouble-free. And because they know the thoughts of the "host", they can do beneficial things for the "host", which makes all their lives more pleasant, and things can get done efficiently. This is not to say that they become servants.
While they do have their own personality, they are effectively absorbing the personality of their "host" and co-mingling it with their own, so they must choose a "host" wisely with respect to what kind of people they want to be. They do not lose themselves; they are simply very suggestable.
So the girls walk to the nearest city and basically live unsuspectingly on the street, constantly surveying passing minds for someone suitable, and eventually someone suitable comes along. He sees them, and may waves, or maybe does nothing more than glance as he passes, but they read him as completely non-threatening, in as far as they were able to read him.
They follow him and continue to read him as he has other interactions as well as his ambient thought, among which includes where he lives. They determine that the best course of action is for him to find them in his house when he gets home. He's curious and go-with-the-flow enough to not kick them out, but also will not try to take advantage of them.
He does not live closely surrounded by many people, and he's not chatty with his neighbors, so there's no high risk of anyone calling the authorities on suspicion of nefarious activities.
That's the base premise, in my mind, but either by selection or desperation, who they attach to will determine the genre.
One of the things I imagine is the "host" as someone wealthy who has dealings with bad guys, though he is, himself, not an all that bad guy. The girls' advanced ability to learn allows them to become exceptional martial artists who become his bodyguards/assistants.
I imagine a bad guy knowing only that they can read thoughts, and saying to the man something like, "It must be nice to have two beautiful ladies at your command", and then the man will say, "Oh, dear fellow. No one commands them. And no one with half a brain would try to."
This is how it works: They know what you want, and if they determine that it serves the unit to do something for you, they they do it. You don't need to ASK them to do anything, and you sure as fuck don't TELL them what to do.