Even as a child, the individual now known as Arka Omnis spent more time with machines than other people; their unusual tendencies alienated them from the other children, as did the fact that they, a human by all accounts, were adopted into a dwarven family of clockmakers after being found abandoned in the mean streets of the Imperial Capital. Ordinarily, this relative isolation would lead a young person into despair but Arka was in fact perfectly happy to while their days away with their nose in an old manual, or learning the science of clockwork under the tutelage of their adopted father.
In their adolescent years, however, Arka began receiving strange insights seemingly out of nowhere, and swiftly applied them to improving the designs of their father and in the forging of entirely new contraptions. It was during one of these flashes of insight that Arka first clearly heard the voice of their patron, a mysterious entity that imparted Arka with a revolutionary new design: a new autonomous tool that fused magic and technology into its very being. Arka didn't know how to perform magic, but as they toiled away creating the tool, etching the runes they were shown on its shell, it suddenly sparked to life! Incredulous, Arka put away their old tools, and christened this new life NAT-01; hopefully the first in a line of magitechnical automatons.
No sooner had they finished their great work did Arka receive a new communication from their patron, spoken through the tinny speaker inside NAT-01; it was then that Arka received their new name as well as their mission: leave home and seek out the New World, an unexplored frontier that promised as-yet undiscovered technologies and magic alike. Perhaps Arka's patron was surprised by how quickly they accepted this mission, but by the next day they had gathered their most important tools, said a brief goodbye to their adopted family, and set off to the port.
This New World promised to be a strange, lonely frontier, but that was okay. Arka never really liked people anyway.