It might take a good amount of time to make a puppet yourself, but I'm sure you'll figure that out too And then, we're gonna have something even more epic to see Totally looking forward to that!
Well I actually sorta made one last night but I am still trying to figure out what to do. It was a scrappy looking one though, not something I'll be using a lot...
I don't know anything about flash. But I always figured it would be better to make vectors in another program of separate body-parts, and then put these together using flash. At least that is how I would approach it. I could be horribly wrong though :/
I would be surprised if that is limited to AI files. I'm sure .svg would work too. You could use Inkscape if that is true. Or request help from a vector-artist.