Meta-materials are utilized for bringing passive attenuation solution especially in the acoustics and vibration domains. Generally speaking, they are composed of an array or a chain of meta-cells. Here the vibratory energy exchanges between particles of a nonlinear meta-cell are studied. The meta-cell is composed of an outer mass which houses an inner mass with a compound nonlinear restoring forcing term. It is globally non-smooth, containing pure cubic and piece-wise linear terms, which constitutes a new type of nonlinearity for such mass-in-mass cells. The complexified form of system equations is treated by the multiple time scale method to find out its fast and slow dynamics, leading to determination of the slow invariant manifold as well as the singular and equilibrium points of the system. The compound nonlinear restoring forcing function of the inner mass makes the global geometry of the slow invariant manifold to be different from those of systems with pure cubic nonlinearities, for example, including four singular lines and two distinct unstable zones. Amplitude dependency of the frequency of such a nonlinear system in the conservative form is represented by the backbone curves. Furthermore, detected equilibrium points for different external forcing amplitudes are represented by three-dimensional frequency response curves. Finally, analytical predictions are confronted with numerical results obtained by direct time integration of the system equations. An application of such system can be the passive control of main systems via embedding another nonlinear oscillator inside it. Moreover, such system can also be extended in the form of an array to create meta-materials.