Orellius was an inhabited class M planet in the Orellius system, in the Alpha Quadrant. This planet was 160 million kilometers from the F-type star Orellius Minor and was far away from the trade routes. The xupta tree was native to this planet.

History

In the 2350s, Alixus choose this planet for her planned community.

In 2360, the SS Santa Maria, a colony ship bound for Gemulon V, detected a low-level duonetic field on the planet's surface. The field had been established on the planet by Alixus, who helped design it. The field inhibited energy flow aboard the starship, causing a failure in its life support system. As the ship landed on the planet for repairs, the engines failed, resulting in a crash landing. The crew and passengers of the Santa Maria threw away parts of the ship, including waveguides, conduits, and baffle plates, which could not be used because of the field.

In the next ten years the community survived on the planet by, for example, treating disease with primitive medicine, finding new sources of food, and establishing a system of law and order. However, the absence of technology also resulted in multiple deaths, most notably as the result of dangerous insect bites that proved difficult to treat using only herbal medicine. Law and order took a primitive and brutal form based around authoritarian rule, with severe punishments such as a punishment box, a small and claustrophobic box barely large enough to hold a Human, in which colonists were locked for some amount of time to bake in the direct sunlight, without water, for crimes like stealing. However despite these issues, the colonists were in general happy with their new life. A few years before 2370, the colonists discovered a native edible pear-like fruit growing along a river bank.

In 2370, Commander Benjamin Sisko and Chief Miles O'Brien of the Starfleet runabout USS Rio Grande were prospecting the area for potential new colonies, when they also got stranded on the planet. They discovered that the stranding of the Santa Maria was not an accident, as the colonists had been led to believe, but rather an elaborate plot by Alixus. It was brought to light that she had planned everything in advance, and used a power generator to create the duogenic field herself, in order to bring her social theories into practice and create what she perceived as a perfect community. Alixus tried to manipulate the two Starfleet officers into joining her community, using sexual favors and torture in the punishment box among other means. She also tried to auto-pilot their runabout in orbit into the system's star in an effort to evade further discovery. However, the runabout missed the target, and when it was eventually located by Starfleet, they were able to extrapolate its starting point. As a result, the Federation officially re-established contact with the colony. The deception by Alixus became fully known to the colony, too, but most thought that the community they had created was not worth giving up. (DS9: "Paradise")