The receptionist at the front desk is waiting

The woman behind the front desk is dressed in a fairly standard-seeming receptionist's outfit. A plaque in front of her declares that her name is Donna. She doesn't even look up from her computer monitor until you reach the desk. "Can I help you, Miss?" she asks.

You wring your fingers together, excited nerves fluttering in your chest. "Yes, I'd like to sign up for the voluntary program here?"

The receptionist nods, clicking over to something on her monitor. "And how long would you like your stay to be?"

"Lifetime," you reply. That finally gets a response from her, a single blink and a sideways glance, but instead of saying anything else she continues working on her monitor for a few seconds more while you try not to fidget. Then there's the sound of a printer running somewhere behind the desk.

The receptionist bends over to grab something, producing a thick ream of papers. She passes them across the desk. "I'll just need to go read and sign these." You accept them with a nod, as well as a proffered pen, and move to a table with a few chairs over to the side of the entrance.

The forms are thoroughly thick with legal jargon, but as best as you can follow it is the sort of disclaimers you would expect - the duration of your stay will not be terminated earlier than that accepted by the undersigned bar incidence of medical emergency, in which case they will be readmitted once the medical emergency has been treated, the undersigned agrees that they will not be counted for local population censuses, the facility is not liable for the following, yadda yadda yadda. You go through and sign where it asks you to largely in silence. No one else comes in from outside while you're working through the thick ream of forms, but at one point a man does come from somewhere within the facility. He goes and speaks with the receptionist in a voice low enough that you can't hear what was said, then leaves again.

Finally, you reach the last page and sign it with relief. You stand and go back over to the front desk, passing over the documents and the borrowed pen. The receptionist flicks through them quickly and professionally, signing herself in a few places that you'd seen had asked for a witness to the documents being filled out. She reached the last page as well and gathers the documents together, giving them a quick tap against the desk. "I'll need to see a photo ID," she says, and you quickly produce your driver's liscense. She takes it, examines it critically, then nods and attaches it to the front page with a paperclip, before then putting the lot of it together into a large manila envelope.

"Now," she says, "we have a few sub-programs and customizations that individual entrants can go into. Involuntary members have their program decided by the staff here and the courts, but since you're entering willingly you get to choose which of our programs would you like to enter. I can introduce them to you if you'd like."