Current Eorzean year.

[Jandor]

The proper way to reflect this is obviously to have Alisaie hit her growth spurt first.

I was picturing a sort of credits finish rolling, location and current year appears on screen, fade in, adult Alphi and Alisaie walk in "That was a crazy 5 years, WoL. What will you do now?" situation.

Something like that, but y'know, good.

[WhiteArchmage]

(Can't we teleport though, once we have attuned to aetherites? Not just from a gemplay point of view but in lore too? I remember the twins and ourselves literaly teleporting into Lakshmi's lair for instance -without attuning, mind you- so couldn't this at least cut some of these travels? Sure Carvallain needs to do the full thing with his boat, but I thought we were able to teleport anyway!)

Teleportation is VERY weirdly handled lore-wise. 1.0 had "Anima" as a limited but renewable resource that dictated how far and often you could teleport. This was SEEMINGLY dropped in 2.0 and instead uses gil (the lore explanation for this was the Aetherytes breaking and Eorzea taking out a loan from the Syndicate to repair them, the gil is meant to pay back that loan), but when repairing the Aetheryte at the House of the Fierce, Alphinaud will mention that they're basically only doing it for people with large amounts of Anima, such as yourself...

So sometimes it's treated like a very convenient plot device that negates travel times, and other times it's this prohibitive skill that's not as commonplace. For example: Flow was a big deal because you can't Teleport in battle and 2.55 respected that with Y'shtola using the riskier but shorter Flow. And then in 3.4(4?) the Devout of Darkness uses Teleport damn near instantly and everyone just neglects to stop her.

[kaynide]

The only time “time” is talked about is during the Rising events, and even then it’s by Yoshida and decidedly NOT canon. He always says his meetings are outside of the in game world.

The minstrel and related NPCs to the rising do talk of “years” passing as that the Rising is a yearly thing, but that is also easily hand waved by the 5 year gap between 1.0 and 2.0.

Reminds me of the Simpsons tbh.

[Jandor]

Reminds me of the Simpsons tbh.

That's the comparison they used when describing the time bubble if I recall correctly. Which does make me wonder just how seriously we were ever meant to take the concept.

[GoldStarz]

Teleportation is VERY weirdly handled lore-wise. 1.0 had "Anima" as a limited but renewable resource that dictated how far and often you could teleport. This was SEEMINGLY dropped in 2.0 and instead uses gil (the lore explanation for this was the Aetherytes breaking and Eorzea taking out a loan from the Syndicate to repair them, the gil is meant to pay back that loan), but when repairing the Aetheryte at the House of the Fierce, Alphinaud will mention that they're basically only doing it for people with large amounts of Anima, such as yourself...

So sometimes it's treated like a very convenient plot device that negates travel times, and other times it's this prohibitive skill that's not as commonplace. For example: Flow was a big deal because you can't Teleport in battle and 2.55 respected that with Y'shtola using the riskier but shorter Flow. And then in 3.4(4?) the Devout of Darkness uses Teleport damn near instantly and everyone just neglects to stop her.

Anima is definitely still a thing, they mention it during the 3.0 relic questline briefly, too. It's just they retconned the player character to have Infinity Anima so the only currency you need for it is gil.

As for people teleporting, I think the general idea is that while Aetherytes are good for planned out long-distance travel, most people don't have the energy to zip around from place to place like you can. I think it's safe to assume that anytime a character has to travel a particularly large distance and there isn't another means of travel explicitly mentioned, then they probably teleported.