The Vault

1. INT. CHONKSY'S APARTMENT · NIGHT · PREP MONTAGE

A heist-movie prep montage, in parody. Snappy cuts, drums.

Gear laid out in neat rows: two headlamps, a crowbar, a lock pick set. Then four enormous bags of snacks.

On a tablet video call, SEAVER holds up a rope he braided from kelp.

SEAVER (V.O.): Structurally questionable. (beat) Emotionally strong.

CHUMPY packs a fifth bag of snacks.

CHONKSY: It's a forty-minute job.

CHUMPY: And if it becomes a forty-day job?

CHONKSY puts on his old Academy fedora. It pops off. He puts it on again. It pops off. He gets duct tape. He tapes it to his head. It holds.

CHUMPY: What's the plan?

CHONKSY: Go in. Don't touch anything that isn't a tape. Come out.

CHUMPY: Love a three-step plan.

CHONKSY: That's the whole plan.

CHUMPY: And I said I love it.

2. INT. VAULT HATCH · NIGHT

A rusted hatch on top of the buried container. CHONKSY drops through. CHUMPY follows and gets stuck at the hips.

CHUMPY: I'm stuck.

CHONKSY: (pushing from below) Breathe out.

CHUMPY: I am breathed out. This is my breathed-out size.

CHUMPY: (straining) I should get in shape.

CHONKSY: Now? NOW you should?

CHUMPY: It's a journey!

POP. They tumble into darkness and catch the kelp rope. It holds.

SEAVER (V.O., comms): …Huh.

2b. INT. VAULT · DESCENT

Headlamps cut through drifting silt. Darkness. Their voices echo.

CHUMPY: (whisper) It smells like a library.

CHONKSY: It smells like a library that died.

3. INT. VAULT · THE BAIT SHELF

Their beams land on a long shelf displayed like a jewelry store: premium chew-wood logs, aged cedar, polished birch branches, each on its own velvet cushion under its own tiny spotlight. Each one has a tiny tag light glowing on it, which they don't notice.

CHONKSY: Who's this for?

CHUMPY: (reverent) Seaver would die here. (beat) He'd just… live here. We'd never see him again. He'd send postcards. Made of wood.

CHONKSY: Why would anyone put wood in a vault?

CHUMPY: Why would anyone put anything anywhere?

CHONKSY doesn't like it. He's an Academy guy. He files it.

4. INT. VAULT · THE RULE

CHONKSY: Remember. Don't touch anything that isn't a tape.

CHUMPY salutes. The salute knocks his headlamp sideways, so for the rest of the episode it shines a little to the left of wherever he's looking.

5. INT. VAULT · THE PASTRY SHELF

CHUMPY's crooked beam lands on a dusty shelf holding three faded foil packets of frosted toaster pastry. The light catches the foil. A choir is heard. (It's not a real choir. It's in his head.)

It's a western standoff: a lone harmonica, an extreme close-up of CHUMPY's eyes, an extreme close-up of the pastry, and a tumbleweed of silt drifting between them.

CHUMPY (V.O., inner monologue): It's been in here sixty years. (beat) It's fine. (beat) Nothing's fine. (beat) It's frosted.

6. INT. VAULT · THE SLIP

Slowly CHUMPY's flipper reaches out, takes one packet, and slides it into his vest pocket.

CHUMPY: (whisper, to himself) For later.

Behind the shelf, a tiny red tag light begins to blink. Blink. Blink.

CHONKSY (O.S., distant): You good?

CHUMPY: So good. So, so good. Never been gooder. Gooder than I've ever been.

CHONKSY (O.S.): That's a lot of goods.

CHUMPY: It's a good vault.

7. INT. VAULT · THE AISLES

CHONKSY turns a corner and stops. Cathedral-tall aisles of metal shelves, holding hundreds of round film cans, rows into the dark. Dust and silt glitter in the crossing beams.

CHONKSY reads the labels aloud as he walks: names of chonk directors nobody has ever heard of.

CHONKSY: (reading) "Merrow." "Delphine Okafin." "The Brothers Brine." (beat) "Fince Agillsan."

CHUMPY: (small) There's so many.

CHONKSY: They told us there were none.

8. INT. VAULT · THE PROJECTOR

A projector under a dusty tarp. CHONKSY fumbles with the film can: the reel, the gate, the sprockets. He has no idea how to thread it.

CHUMPY gently takes it from him and threads it perfectly in about six seconds.

CHONKSY: How do you know how to do that?

CHUMPY: (beat) My mom had one.

He flicks the switch. The lamp glows. The reel turns. Their headlamps go off. Darkness, then light on the vault wall.

9. THE LONG REEF · REEL ONE

From here the episode is the film: black and white, 4:3, film grain, Fince Agillsan's patient frames. No cutaways to our heroes. Sparse dialogue.

TITLE CARD (painted): THE LONG REEF.

A reef desert at dawn. Silt drifts across the frame like wind-blown sand. A long, long shot, eight seconds, ten, of a single rider growing on the horizon.

The rider: a young MANATEE COWGIRL on a seahorse. A pineapple earring. She rides into a frontier town: a saloon, a bank, a church made of coral. Townsfolk (seals, otters, a walrus blacksmith) stop to stare.

BLACKSMITH: You lost, miss?

COWGIRL: (dismounting, slowly) Not yet.

10. THE LONG REEF · REEL TWO

The town hall. A PREACHER, a stern old seal, stands at a lectern. The town is gathered.

PREACHER: Across the canyon they wait. Eight-armed. Ink-blooded. They took our grain. They'll take our children next.

TOWNSFOLK: (murmuring) War. War.

The COWGIRL stands at the back by the door. She doesn't murmur.

COWGIRL: (quiet) Anybody see them take it?

Nobody answers. The preacher looks at her a long time.

PREACHER: Faith doesn't need seeing, miss.

COWGIRL: (putting on her hat) Grain does.

11. THE LONG REEF · REEL THREE

Night. The COWGIRL rides alone across the canyon into the octopus settlement: humble spiral homes and ink lanterns. An OCTOPUS SHERIFF meets her with a lantern and doesn't draw.

OCTOPUS SHERIFF: You came alone.

COWGIRL: Seemed polite.

He leads her to the octopus grain stores: burned black, still smoking.

OCTOPUS SHERIFF: Your side struck first. Three nights ago. We buried four.

Long silence. The COWGIRL takes off her glove and touches the ash. She already knew.

COWGIRL: (barely) …Somebody told it backwards.

OCTOPUS SHERIFF: Somebody always does.

12. THE LONG REEF · REEL FOUR

Dawn. Main Street. Both armies have come: chonk settlers with rifles at one end, octopuses with spears at the other.

The COWGIRL rides into the middle of the street and stops between them. She says nothing. She dismounts. She takes off her hat.

One by one, from both sides, the weapons lower. A seal. An octopus. The walrus blacksmith. The preacher is last. His hands shake. He lowers it.

The COWGIRL gets back on her seahorse and rides out of town into a sunset of falling silt.

Hold on the empty street for a long time. Fince Agillsan would hold it longer. We hold it longer.

TITLE CARD: THE END.

21. THE CITY WATCHING: SAME NIGHT

The one cutaway, at the end of the film. A cross-section of a New Chonk City block, like a dollhouse: in every lit window, diners, apartments and a store window, chonks laugh at the same cheap remake on their TVs.

Below the street, in the dark vault, two tiny figures sit in silence in a projector's beam.

No city sound. Only the western's last notes.

13. INT. VAULT

The reel flaps at the end. The projector ticks. Light on CHONKSY's face. His eyes, for once, are all the way open. One tear.

CHUMPY: (whisper) That's Old Seacow.

CHONKSY: (whisper) That's everything.

Beat.

CHUMPY: Ask for the mango.

CHONKSY: …Ask for the mango.

14. INT. VAULT · LEAVING

They pack three reels into a duffel. CHONKSY pulls one more can off a shelf, labeled in old handwriting: FIRST WAVE · UNTITLED SITCOM.

At the hatch, CHUMPY puts his paw over the pocket with the pastry. He looks back at the shelf. He thinks about putting it back.

He doesn't.

16. INT. SEAVER'S APARTMENT · NIGHT

SEAVER asleep in bed with a nightcap, smiling. A dream bubble: a shelf of perfect chew-wood glowing under tiny spotlights on velvet. He's never seen it. He dreams of it anyway.

SEAVER: (sleep-talking) Structurally… beautiful.

END OF EPISODE

PUNCH-UP INSERTS · EP 6

• Sc 1: Chumpy's fifth snack bag is labeled (in post) EMERGENCY. Chonksy: "What's the emergency?" Chumpy: "Hunger. It's always hunger."
• Sc 2: Stuck in the hatch: "Push harder." "I'm pushing." "Push like you mean it." "I've never meant anything this much and I'm still stuck."
• Sc 3: Chumpy on the beaver bait: "That's beaver porn." Chonksy: "Don't." Chumpy: "Seaver would finish in here."
• Sc 5: During the pastry standoff, the harmonica player is revealed to be a tiny shrimp in a cowboy hat sitting on the shelf. Chumpy: "Not now." The shrimp: "(stops, offended) …Fine." He keeps playing anyway, quieter.
• Sc 7: Reading the director names: "'The Brothers Brine.' 'Delphine Okafin.' (beat) 'Kevin.'" Chumpy: "Just Kevin?" Chonksy: "Just Kevin." Chumpy: "(moved) Kevin made a movie."
• The Long Reef, reel 2: The preacher's sermon should be genuinely ugly and genuinely persuasive ("ink-blooded," "they breed in the dark," "they'll teach your children to write"). It's the show's bigotry satire at its sharpest. Nobody laughs, because it isn't a joke.
• Sc 13 (heart, peak): After the film, Chonksy says the realest line of the season: "I'd give up all of it. Every movie. To have made one minute of that." Chumpy, quietly: "I know." Beat. "That's why I'm here." Beat. "Also there was a pastry."
• Sc 15: During the sitcom reel, Chumpy laughs so hard he farts, a big wet underwater bubble. He keeps laughing. Chonksy doesn't acknowledge it. That's friendship.

31. INT. SEA SI BUDGET MEETING · DAY · after Scene 7

• Fluorescent panels. Grey dolphin bureaucrats around a table, all smiling, because dolphins can't stop smiling, which is why everyone fears them. Director Gary is asleep with one eye open (dolphins sleep half a brain at a time). "Is Gary awake?" "Half."
• Accountant: "The vault honeypot is still our most cost-effective program. Three catches in sixty years. Zero staff. The pastries are the only line item." Director: "Can we switch to a cheaper pastry?" Accountant: "We tried a fig bar in the 80s. Nobody took the fig bar." Director (gravely): "Nobody takes the fig bar."
• On the wall, a mounted anglerfish alarm. Its lure flickers, then glows red. Accountant: "Oh." Every dolphin turns, smiling. "…We just got one." Gary's other eye opens.

40. THE HATCH, WITH A CLOCK · Scene 2 · Farley

• Same gag as before, now with a clock: the tide is turning, the hatch is closing on its own, and Chumpy is stuck. Chonksy: "Exhale!" Chumpy: "We've done this bit!" Chonksy: "IT WORKED!" He finishes his second exhale of his life and drops through just as the hatch seals on his tail. A tuft of his fur stays outside the vault. (In Ep 9, the agents find it.)

41. IT'S A SAMPLE · Scene 5, the pastry shelf · Larry David / Tim Robinson

• Chumpy: "It's open. When it's open, it's a sample." Chonksy: "It's not open." Chumpy opens it. Chumpy: "It's open." Chonksy: "Put it back." Chumpy (genuinely appalled): "You can't put back a sample. That's disgusting. Who raised you?" Chonksy: "GOTTER." Chumpy: "And he'd be ashamed."
• The clock reads 9:40 left.

42. GOOD WOOD · Scene 3, the bait shelf · Seinfeld

• Chonksy (whispering): "Who stocks a vault with beaver chew-wood? What kind of thief are they expecting?" Seaver, over comms, very quietly, after a long pause: "…It's good wood." Chonksy: "Seaver." Seaver: "I'm just saying. Somebody cared."