I'm currently using Mercury Particle Engine for the particle effects in my game, and I'm trying to create a sort of lightning whip - basically a lightning effect bound to a line that curves when the player moves. I know how to use the editor, and I have particle effects working in game. However, I'm completely lost as to where I should start for this specific particle effect.

Perhaps if I could find the code for it in a different particle engine, I could convert it, but I can't seem to find that either. What I did find was a lot of tutorials for creating the lines associated with lightning programmatically, which doesn't help in this case because I don't want it to be rigid. Perhaps it would be more like some sort of laser beam with crackling effects around it? I'm running into a wall as far as even beginning to implement this goes.