Hair particles offset from the object and grouping

I’m trying to model simple thin tentacle-like structures by using hair particles system instead of sculpting them manually. My best attempt is shown in the image below (red long thingies on the left).

I’ve been playing with the particle system settings so far and there are two things I cannot figure out how to do:

• Bring the tentacles closer to the emitting object, so there is no gap.
• Avoid them running in pairs and make them spread out or bloom randomly.

A couple of important notes:

• I will have a lot of these objects so I’m keeping them fairly low-poly. Tentacles should grow from a small area. So what I’m doing is just subdivide a very small part of the surface and then emit particles from those subdivided vertices. I’m not sure if this affects the distance issue, but even if does I am unable to figure out how to change it.
• In order to apply kink or braid effects I have to enable children (either simple or interpolated). This is bunching up together a lot of hair and I need only individual strands. So I’m setting both display and render amount to 1. Still, as you can see on the image, pairs of hairs will form. Is there a way to "break" them up somehow and make them diverge away from each other? Not sure if this is possible to do with children.

Anyhow, thank you in advice for any guidance.