No, you haven't missed anything. The problem lies in thinking of the Vault as a library, where you can store and check out characters, That's a feature of the Transmogrifier and a special library campaign. The Vault is to give you a way to move a character into an appropriately permissioned game. It's a medium of moving the character, not a storage place. You should always have your character in the game it was created in, while at the free level. You view the sheet there. The vault just keeps a "snapshot" of the last version you imported.
