Vegas Vs. The Roil (Patreon)

I'm concerned that the detours to vegas and alcatraz are slow reading, and they don't advance the plot at all: they don't even work as a chekov's gun that he pulls out at the last minute, so they just sit there doing nothing like an appendix.
 

Here's the paragraphs :
Jeb visited Alcatraz using an abandoned ferry boat and found an Imprisonment and Hopelessness lens on the grounds of the historic prison, as well as several families of squatters using it as a fortress, a la The Walking Dead. Jeb was able to barter his way in with food and refilling their water tank.

Predictably, they tried to lock him up and force him to use his Myst powers to provide food and drinking water indefinitely, but Jeb politely unlocked the cell and left while they were asleep.

They took a few potshots at him while he was leaving, but none of them hit anything important.

The trip to Vegas was uneventful. The city itself was abandoned, already beginning to be reclaimed by the desert that surrounded it. Not even the Mad Max type people wanted to hang around a city that didn’t have any natural sources of water.

All the pools and fountains outside the towering casinos were all dried up, sand and grit beginning to coalesce around the entrances to the towering monuments to excess. Reclaiming them like the tombs of the pharaohs of old.

Jeb navigated the Stitch-torn city as best he could with fliers pointing out all the POI in the party town.

Jeb searched all the major casinos, the strip clubs, the escort services, banks, cash 4 gold places,

Jeb found a few Compulsive Gambling lenses that looked like poker chips, and a Euphoria (addictive) lens that looked like a lumpy white pill about the size of a pinky. sveral different flavors of Hedonism lenses, a glitter lens that looked like a disco ball, several different dancing lenses, a couple of them pretty exotic.

Honestly, none of them were particularly useful in and of themselves, but unless Jeb missed his guess, they were probably incredibly valuable to the upper crust of the empire, who would likely pay through the nose to have a good time.

Jeb stored the party lenses away in a small locking case lest he be tempted to misuse them.

After he cleaned out Vegas, Jeb headed back to the southwest, angling for L.A.

Instead of those paragraphs^ i was thinking about doing something to do with Jeb running away from/briefly encountering the Roil as foreshadowing for the end of the book. Thoughts?

Keep in mind, Jeb can go to these places in later books and spend entire chapters there!